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PRESENTED  BY 

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BV  A501  .S737  1917 

Speer,  Robert  E.  1867-1947 

The  stuff  of  manhood 


THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 


By  ROBERT  E.  SPEER 

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Tie  Merrick  Lectures  for  igib-lj.    Delivered mc  the  Ohiq    .  t .  ^ 

fVeileyan    Uni'versity,  Delaware,  OAio,  ^pril  As,  J^IJ  <v        ln^i>j 


The  Stuff  of  Manho 


^^mki  8i>^ 


SOME  NEEDED  NOTES  IN 
AMERICAN    CHARACTER 


By 
ROBERT  E.  SPEER 


New  York  Chicago  Toronto 

Fleming  H.   Revell    Company 

London  and  Edinburgh 


Copyright,  1917,  by 
FLEMING  H.  REVELL  COMPANY 


New  York:  158  Fifth  Avenue 
Chicago:  17  North  Wabash  Ave. 
Toronto:  25  Richmond  Street,  W. 
London :  2 1  Paternoster  Square 
Edinburgh:      100    Princes    Street 


The  Merrick  Lectures 

BY  the  gift  of  the  late  Rev.  Frederick 
Merrick,  M.  D.,  D.  D..  LL.  D.,  for  fifty- 
one  years  a  member  of  the  Faculty,  and 
for  thirteen  of  those  years  President  of  Ohio 
Wesleyan  University,  a  fund  was  established 
providing  an  annual  income  for  the  purpose  of 
securing  lectures  within  the  general  field  of 
Experimental  and  Practical  Religion.  The  fol- 
lowing courses  have  previously  been  given  on 
this  foundation  : 

Daniel  Curry,  D.  D. — "  Christian  Education." 

President  James   McCosh,    D.   D.,   LL.   D. — 
"  Tests  of  the  Various  Kinds  of  Truth." 

Bishop  Randolph  S.   Foster,  D.  D.,  LL.  D. — 
"  The  Philosophy  of  Christian  Experience." 

Professor  James  Stalker,  D.  D. — "The  Preacher 
and  His  Models." 

John  W.   Buder,   D.  D. — "  Mission  Work  in 
Mexico." 

Professor  George  Adam  Smith,  D.  D.,  LL.  D. 
— "  Christ  in  the  Old  Testament." 

Bishop   James   W.   Bashford,   Ph.   D.,  D.  D., 
LL.  D. — "  The  Science  of  Religion." 

James  M.  Buckley,  D.  D.,  LL.  D.— "  The  Nat- 
ural and  Spiritual  Orders  and  Their  Relations." 

5 


6  THE  MERRICK  LECTURES 

John  R.  Mott,  M.  A.,  F.  R.  G.  S.— "  The 
Pastor  and  Modern  Missions." 

Bishop  Elijah  E.  Hoss,  D.  D.,  LL.  D. ;  Professor 
Doremus  A.  Hayes,  Ph.  D.,  S.  T.  D.,  LL.  D. ; 
Charles  E.  Jefferson,  D.  D.,  LL.  D, ;  Bishop 
William  F.  McDowell,  D.  D.,  LL.  D.  ;  President 
Edwin  H.  Hughes,  D.  D.— "  The  New  Age  and 
Its  Creed." 

Robert  E.  Speer,  M.  A.—"  The  Marks  of  a 
Man,  or  The  Essentials  of  Christian  Character," 

Rev.  Charles  Stelzle,  Miss  Jane  Addams,  Com- 
missioner of  Labor  Charles  P.  Neill,  Ph.  D.,  Pro- 
fessor Graham  Taylor,  and  Rev.  George  P. 
Eckman,  D.  D. — "  The  Social  Application  of 
Religion." 

Rev.  George  Jackson,  M.  A. — "  Some  Old  Tes- 
tament Problems." 

Professor  Walter  Rauschenbusch,  D.  D. — 
•'  Christianizing  the  Social  Order." 

Professor  G.  A.  Johnston  Ross,  M.  A. — "  One 
Avenue  of  Faith." 


Introduction 

THE  moral  elements  of  individual  char- 
acter are  inevitably  social.  And  the 
social  obligation  immensely  strengthens 
the  sanctions  which  enjoin  them.  When  a  man 
"  has  trained  himself,"  to  use  the  words  of  Lord 
Morley  in  dealing  with  Voltaire's  religion,  "  to 
look  upon  every  wrong  in  thought,  every  duty 
omitted  from  act,  each  infringement  of  the  inner 
spiritual  law  which  humanity  is  constantly  per- 
fecting for  its  own  guidance  and  advantage 
.  .  .  as  an  ungrateful  infection,  weakening 
and  corrupting  the  future  of  his  brothers,"  he 
views  each  struggle  within  his  own  soul  against 
evil  and  each  firm  aspiration  after  purity  not  as 
a  mere  incident  in  his  own  spiritual  biography 
but  as  a  fight  for  social  good  and  for  the  per- 
fecting of  the  nation  and  of  humanity.  And  the 
struggle  for  social  good  and  the  perfecting  of 
human  life  is  fundamentally  a  struggle  for  the 
triumph  of  ideals  in  personal  wills.  God  can 
take  hold  of  men  only  in  man.  He  revealed 
Himself  and  wrought  redemption  less  by  a  social 
process  than  by  a  personal  incarnation.  And  the 
only  way  of  which  we  know  to  uplift  the  life  of  the 
nation  and  to  fit  it  for  its  mission  and  its  ministry 

7 


8  INTRODUCTION 

is  to  reform  our  own  and  other  men's  characters, 
and  ourselves  to  be  what  manner  of  man  among 
men  we  would  have  the  nation  be  among  na- 
tions. It  is  of  some  of  the  elements  of  character 
of  which  men  stand  specially  in  need  to-day  that 
we  are  to  speak  in  these  lectures.  What  is  good 
in  our  lives  as  individuals  and  in  our  life  as  a  na- 
tion is  not  in  need  of  discussion  here.  And  there 
is  no  nobility  in  analyzing  and  deriding  our 
weaknesses.  Our  purpose  is  to  urge  our  keeping 
if  we  have  not  lost  them,  and  our  regaining  if  we 
feel  them  slipping  from  us,  some  of  the  elemental 
moral  qualities  and  spiritual  resources  which  are 
vital  to  the  capacity  for  duty  and  to  the  living  of 
a  full  and  efficient  life. 

It  has  seemed  best,  on  the  whole,  to  preserve 
in  the  printed  volume  the  free  colloquialism  of 
the  lectures  as  they  were  delivered. 

R.  E.  S. 

New  York, 


Contents 

I        Discipline  AND  Austerity      .        .        .11 

II.  The    Conservation    and    Release    of 

Moral  Resources     ....       50 

III.  An  Unfrightened  Hope        ...       8$ 

IV.  The  Joy  OF  the  Minority      .        .        .118 
V.    The  Life  Invisible         .        ,        •        ,160 


LECTURE  I 
DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY 

WHETHER  there  should  be  compulsory- 
military  training  in  America  is  a  ques- 
tion which  some  people  will  answer 
yes  or  no  according  to  their  general  theories  and 
others  according  to  their  observation  of  the  actual 
effects  of  such  training  on  moral  character.  But 
whatever  our  views  may  be  on  this  familiar  ques- 
tion, whether  we  regard  military  service  as  ethic- 
ally helpful  in  its  influence  or  as  morally  injuri- 
ous, we  cannot  difier  as  to  the  need  in  our  na- 
tional character  of  those  qualities  of  self-control, 
of  quick  and  unquestioning  obedience  to  duty, 
of  joyful  contempt  of  hardship,  and  of  zest  in 
difficult  and  arduous  undertakings  which,  rightly 
or  wrongly,  we  consider  soldierly,  which  we  at- 
tribute in  such  rich  measure  to  our  forefathers, 
and  which  the  moral  exigencies  of  our  national 
task  to-day  as  peremptorily  demand.  To  put 
these  primary  and  elemental  needs  as  sharply  as 
possible,  let  us  call  them  discipline  and  austerity. 
Our  American  character  needs  more  of  both. 

I  do  not  know  a  better  starting  point  than  is 
found  in  one  of  those  vivid  modern  touches  upon 

11 


12  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

which  we  constantly  come  in  the  Old  Testament. 
This  one  is  in  the  account  of  the  closing  year  of 
King  David's  life.  The  story  seems  ancient  and 
far  away  until  we  suddenly  read  :  "  His  father 
had  not  displeased  him  at  any  time  saying,  Why 
hast  thou  done  so  ?  "  If  we  were  to  translate  the 
words  more  directly  into  the  language  of  our 
own  day,  we  should  say,  "  His  father  had  always 
let  him  do  exactly  as  he  pleased."  The  reference 
is  to  David  and  his  son  Adonijah,  and  to  the  want 
of  discipline  by  which  the  father  had  ruined  his 
boy. 

It  is  not  hard  to  reconstruct  the  story.  David 
was  busy  about  his  cares  as  king,  and  his  heart 
was  indulgent  towards  his  children.  Adonijah 
seems  to  have  been  his  youngest  son,  and  the 
father  let  him  have  his  way,  never  reining  him 
up  or  checking  him  by  asking  why  he  had  done 
thus  or  so.  David  pursued,  in  other  words,  the 
modern  theory  of  child  training  :  that  the  one 
principle  by  which  children  should  be  educated 
is  the  principle  of  letting  what  is  naturally  in 
them  come  out ;  that  they  must  not  be  crossed 
or  frustrated,  or  have  any  external  discipline  or 
control  laid  upon  their  lives.  This  is,  of  course, 
the  extreme  of  it,  but  in  some  form  we  hear  the 
theory  and  see  it  applied  all  about  us  every  day. 

And  it  is  a  modern  theory  of  self-education, 
also.  We  are  told  that  life  should  be  left  free  to 
follow  its  native  impulses  ;  that  it  should  not  be 


DISCII^LINE  AND  AUSTERITY        13 

thwarted  and  intimidated  by  the  conventions  and 
prohibitions  of  society  ;  that  men  and  women 
should  consult  their  own  hearts  and  then  should 
move  out  quite  freely  in  obedience  to  their 
promptings ;  that  their  lives  and  the  lives  of  their 
children  should  not  be  twisted  or  deflected  by  the 
imposition  of  any  external  authority  or  command. 

Well,  that  was  the  way  Adonijah  was  brought 
up.  His  father  was  rich.  The  boy  had  his  own 
establishment,  his  own  horses,  his  own  retinue  of 
attendants,  and  round  about  him,  as  about  any 
oriental  king's  son,  there  would  be  the  usual 
crowd  of  flatterers  and  sycophants.  There  was 
no  will  or  desire  that  he  had  not  the  means  to 
gratify,  and  his  father  let  him  have  his  way. 

Further,  he  was  the  younger  brother  of  Ab- 
salom, and  the  ancient  record  says  that  they 
were  handsome  and  popular  boys.  They  had  a 
way  that  carried  along  those  who  came  in  touch 
with  them,  and  as  the  king's  sons,  and  the  lead- 
ing young  men  of  the  city,  we  have  no  difBculty 
in  understanding  the  atmosphere  in  which  they 
lived  and  the  conditions  within  which  they  grew. 

It  must  be  confessed  that  this  was  the  easy 
way  of  going  about  the  matter.  It  is  far  easier 
to  let  a  child  have  its  own  way  than  to  endeavour 
by  wisdom  and  patience  and  strength,  to  study 
and  decide  what  is  best  for  the  child  and  without 
hurting  the  child's  will,  to  guide  it  into  the  better 
way.     It  was  far  less  care  to  David  to  let  Absa- 


14  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

lorn  and  Adonijah  go  than  it  would  have  been 
to  take  these  high-strung  sons  of  his  in  hand  and 
endeavour  to  break  them  to  discipline  and  truth, 
and  to  send  them  out  into  life  real  men  of 
power.  It  was  much  easier  never  to  call  them 
and  to  say,  "  Boys,  why  did  you  do  this  ?  '* 
Much  easier  never  to  lay  any  authority  or  guid- 
ance upon  them  from  without,  much  easier,  es- 
pecially for  a  man  like  David.  He  had  grown 
up  on  a  farm,  with  all  the  hardship  and  frugality 
of  farm  life,  with  no  privileges  as  a  lad,  and  now 
that  he  was  the  king  of  his  nation,  he  was  able 
to  do  anything  whatever  for  his  sons.  It  was 
difficult  to  refuse  them  the  things  he  had  never 
had.  Easily  and  indulgently — for  he  was  a  man 
of  kindly  heart  all  his  days — he  found  it  simpler 
not  to  lay  hard  restraints  upon  his  boys  when  he 
could  give  them  their  own  way. 

And,  of  course,  this  is  the  easier  way  of  self- 
education  too.  For  a  man  to  love  himself  so 
much  that  he  never  thinks  of  his  neighbours,  to 
blind  his  eyes  so  completely  to  consequences 
that  he  can  live  for  the  passing  moment, — this  is 
a  very  easy  philosophy,  and  the  man  or  the 
woman  who  is  able  to  practice  it  will  seem,  for  a 
while,  to  live  in  the  sunshine,  a  fine  butterfly, 
smooth-going  life.  All  this  is  easier  than  to  say, 
not,  What  is  my  impulse  ?  but,  What  ought  I  ? 
not,  What  do  I  like?  but,  What  is  best  for  all 
the  world  ?    not,   What   is   the  easy   way  ?  but, 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         15 

What  is  the  hard  way  over  which  the  feet  go 
that  carry  the  burdens  of  mankind,  that  bear  the 
load  of  the  world  ? 

But,  though  it  is  the  easy  way  for  a  while,  there 
comes  a  time  when  it  is  no  longer  the  easy  way. 
When  in  his  little  room  above  the  gate  the  old 
king  bowed  his  gray  head  in  his  hands  and  with 
breaking  heart  sobbed  out :  *'  O  my  son  Absa- 
lom !  my  son,  my  son  Absalom  I  would  God  I 
had  died  for  thee,  O  Absalom,  my  son,  my 
son  1 " — it  was  no  longer  the  easy  way.  When 
Adonijah  rose  up  in  insurrection  against  his  old 
father  as  he  lay  on  his  dying  bed,  gathering  his 
little  company  of  sycophants  around  him  and 
setting  himself  up  in  his  father's  place,  then  it 
was  no  longer  the  easy  way  that  the  old  man 
had  pursued. 

And  to-day  still,  fathers  and  mothers  who  for 
a  little  while  thought  the  easy  way  was  never  to 
ask  their  children  why  they  had  done  so,  but  to 
let  them  go  their  own  way  with  no  imposition  of 
outward  authority  or  control,  find  after  a  while 
that  tne  easy  way  has  turned  bitterly  hard.  I 
have  a  friend,  a  leading  merchant  in  one  of  our 
large  cities.  Some  time  ago  another  friend  was 
visiting  him,  and  as  they  walked  down  the  street 
together,  suddenly  a  large  car  whizzed  around 
the  corner,  full  of  young  people,  among  them 
the  merchant's  son.  This  was  the  middle  of  the 
forenoon  and  the  boy  was  supposed  to  be  at  work 


16  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

in  his  father's  establishment.  The  father  turned 
to  his  friend  and  said :  '*  I  wish  I  knew  how  I 
could  hold  my  boy  in."  But  my  friend  under- 
stood why  he  could  not.  He  knew  that  only 
two  or  three  years  before  the  son  had  been  re- 
warded for  passing  examinations  at  college, 
examinations  that  it  ought  to  have  been  taken 
for  granted  that  he  would  pass.  But  his  father 
thought  he  should  be  rewarded  for  passing  them, 
and  he  bought  a  car  and  sent  it  up  to  him  at  col- 
lege. Now  he  wonders  why  this  son  does  not 
know  how  to  bind  himself  to  arduous  duty. 

And  in  our  own  lives  the  easy  education  does  not 
go  easily  all  the  way.  There  comes  a  time  when, 
having  always  indulged  ourselves,  we  can't  break 
the  habit ;  when,  never  having  taken  our  lives  in 
our  hands  and  reined  them  to  the  great  minis- 
tries of  mankind,  we  discover  that  we  cannot. 
We  find  that  we  obey  our  caprices ;  follow  any 
impulse  ;  cannot  stick  to  any  task ;  do  not  know 
a  principle  when  we  see  it ;  have  no  iron  or  steel 
anywhere  in  our  character ;  are  the  riffraff  of  the 
world  that  the  worthy  men  and  women  have  to 
bear  along  as  they  go.  In  Mr.  Kipling's  inele- 
gant lines : 

"  We   was   rotten   'fore   we   started — ^we  was   never 

Aiscxplined  ; 
We  made  it  out  a  favour  if  an  order  was  obeyed ; 
Yes,  every  little  drummer  'ad  'is  rights  and  wrongs 

to  mind, 
So  we  had  to  pay  for  teachin' — an'  we  paid  !  " 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         17 

Now  I  suggest  that  we  put  all  this  positively 
to  ourselves,  for  every  one  of  us  knows  that  we 
are  treading  near  some  of  the  moral  realities  of 
weakness  and  need  in  our  day  and  nation. 
Why  should  restraint,  obedience,  the  authority 
of  duty  and  God  be  let  into  our  lives?  In  order 
that  out  of  all  these  things  self-control  may 
come.  And  why  should  there  be  this  submis- 
sion and  control  of  our  lives  by  duty,  and  truth 
and  God  ?  Well,  the  reasons  are  obvious,  the 
moment  we  begin  to  think  about  them. 

There  is  the  indisputable  fact  that  the  strongest 
and  best  men  and  women  we  know  are  men  and 
women  who  were  trained  in  this  school,  who 
some  time  during  their  life,  and  the  earlier  the 
better,  passed  under  the  discipline  and  influ- 
ence of  that  chastening  spoken  about  in  the 
twelfth  chapter  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews, 
without  which  we  are  not  children  of  a  clean 
God.  All  around  us  are  these  men  and  women, 
fathers  and  mothers,  who  indulge  their  sons 
and  daughters,  who  never  confront  them  with 
moral  principle  and  obligation  and  duty,  and 
then  lament  because  their  children  do  not  seem 
to  have  the  old  iron  grasp  of  duty,  the  old  rigid 
love  of  truth  and  righteousness.  Well,  it  is  all 
very  simple.  It  is  because  those  fathers  and 
mothers  are  denying  to  their  children  the  very 
education  that  made  themselves  what  they  are. 
The  men  and  women,  who  will   not  run  away 


18  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

from  any  task,  who  stand  steadfast  in  the  truth, 
upon  whose  every  word  we  can  rest  our  whole 
soul,  grew  out  of  a  certain  discipline,  a  certain 
education,  and  it  was  the  kind  that  Adonijah  did 
not  have.  And  all  men  and  women  who  want 
to  be  masters  of  their  lives  and  to  have  strength 
to  lay  beneath  the  work  of  the  world  must  ask 
God  that  such  discipline  may  be  given  to  them. 

Not  alone  is  this  the  only  kind  of  training 
that  can  produce  this  kind  of  character,  but  un- 
less a  man  learns  control  from  without,  he  will 
never  learn  self-control.  Unless  he  passes  under 
the  discipline  of  a  wiser  and  stronger  hand  at  the 
beginning,  he  will  never  come  to  the  time  of  de- 
liberate and  moral  self-discipline,  which  alone  is 
character.  For  this  only  is  character, — the  bind- 
ing of  life  beneath  the  firm  sovereignty  of  the 
principle  that  is  the  heart  of  God.  If  nations 
do  not  realize  this  they  will  pay  heavily  for  their 
failure.  "Make  your  educational  laws  strict," 
said  Ruskin,  "and  your  criminal  laws  may  be 
gentle ;  but  leave  youth  its  liberty  and  you  will 
have  to  dig  dungeons  for  age." 

And  it  is  this  that  gives  freedom.  There  is 
no  freedom  outside  of  character.  Liberty,  as 
Montesquieu  says,  is  not  freedom  to  do  just  as 
we  please.  Liberty  is  the  ability  to  do  as  we 
ought.  And  the  freedom  that  we  need  is  not 
the  freedom  of  caprice  and  whim  and  listening  to 
our  impulses.     It  is  the  freedom  that  enables  our 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         19 

eyes  clearly  to  see  what  right  is,  and  then  em- 
powers us  to  do  it.     Symonds  put  it  in  his  verse : 

'*  Soul,  rule  thyself.     On  passion,  deed,  desire, 
Lay  thou  the  law  of  thy  deliberate  will. 
Stand  at  thy  chosen  post,  faith's  sentinel. 
Learn  to  endure.     Thine  the  reward 
Of  those  who  make  living  light  their  Lord. 
Clad  with  celestial  steel  these  stand  secure, 
Masters,  not  slaves." 

And  if  such  self-control  goes  as  far  even  as  the 
self-extinction  of  that  voluntarily  accepted  Cross, 
on  the  green  hill  outside  Jerusalem,  even  so  it 
will  bring  victory  at  the  last,  because  it  has 
brought  one  long  succession  of  victories  over 
self  all  the  days.  I  cut  this  fugitive  bit  of  verse 
from  a  newspaper  the  other  day  : 

"  Pausing  a  moment  ere  the  day  was  done. 
While  yet  the  earth  was  scintillant  with  light, 
I  backward  glanced.    From  valley,  plain  and  height, 
At  intervals,  where  my  life  path  had  run. 
Rose  cross  on  cross  :  and  nailed  upon  each  one 
Was  my  dead  self.    And  yet  that  gruesome  sight 
Lent  sudden  splendour  to  the  falHng  night. 
Showing  the  conquests  that  my  soul  had  won. 

*'  Up  to  the  rising  stars  I  looked  and  cried. 
There  is  no  death  !     For  year  on  year  reborn, 
I  wake  to  larger  life,  to  joy  more  great. 
So  many  times  have  I  been  crucified, 
So  often  seen  the  resurrection  morn, 
I  go  triumphant,  though  new  Calvaries  wait." 

And  this  freedom  and  victory  are  waiting  only 
for  those  lives  that  have  been  broken  beneath 


20  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

the  cross  of  an  absolute  restraint  of  God,  and 
have  so  mastered  themselves  under  God's  name 
by  the  help  of  Christ  that  control  has  been  given 
over  in  trust  into  their  own  hands. 

And  we  all  know  that  power  is  to  be  won  here 
in  this  school  where  men  are  trained  both  to  feel 
and  to  wield  dominion.  There  is  no  power  in 
the  world  that  is  not  power  cabined,  power  held 
in  some  way.  Loose  power  is  imperceptible  and 
utterly  useless.  The  only  power  we  know  is 
power  walled  in,  shut  down,  confined  and  beat- 
ing against  its  barriers  and  its  walls.  We  know 
this  in  the  athletic  life  of  our  colleges  to-day. 
No  athletic  trainer  in  any  college  ever  followed 
David's  method  with  Adonijah.  The  trainer  is 
there  to  say  :  "  Why  did  you  do  it  that  way  ? " 
"  Why  did  you  not  do  it  this  way  ?  You  have 
no  right  to  waste  your  energy  in  that  way.  You 
must  do  it  so."  There  is  one  scene  in  Quo  Vadis 
that  redeems  much  else  in  the  book.  It  is  the 
scene  in  the  Coliseum,  when  the  giant  Gothic 
slave  is  shown  saving  the  life  of  his  mistress, 
whom  he  loved.  The  great  bull  has  come  out 
with  the  girl's  form  tied  to  his  horns,  and  there 
is  dead  silence  as  the  bull  stands  angrily  facing 
the  man.  You  remember  the  picture.  As  Ursus 
lays  one  hand  on  each  horn  of  the  auroch  the 
struggle  begins.  There  is  not  a  sound.  The 
great  multitude  watches  the  man's  muscles  rise 
and  harden  and  the  sweat  come  out  and  drop 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         21 

from  every  pore.  They  see  his  feet  sinking 
down  in  the  arena,  until  the  sand  is  above  his 
ankles.  Suddenly  the  great  head  of  the  bull  be- 
gins to  twist  under  that  awful  strength.  Then 
the  neck  breaks  and  the  giant  lifts  the  limp  form 
from  the  beast's  neck  and  stands  with  the  burden 
in  his  hands  before  the  Emperor.  One  likes  to 
read  such  a  picture  of  power  secured  by  self- 
discipline.  Do  we  want  to  go  out  limp  and 
beaten  and  ineffective  in  our  lives  against  the 
great  mass  of  work  in  the  world  that  waits  to  be 
done  ?  Or  do  we  want  to  go  in  the  strength  of 
Him  Who,  having  bent  beneath  His  Father's 
will,  was  able  to  carry  on  the  Cross  the  whole 
burden  of  human  sin  ? 

And  we  must  learn  in  this  school  the  things 
we  value  and  desire  most :  purity  and  delicacy 
and  refinement  of  character,  for  they  cannot  be 
acquired  elsewhere.  So  much  social  standing 
nowadays  is  uttered  in  terms  of  self-assertion  and 
indulgence  and  the  ability  to  have  any  whim  or 
caprice  gratified.  This  sort  of  self-assertion,  this 
caprice,  is  regarded  by  many  of  us  as  the  highest 
mark  of  social  authority,  whereas  we  know  it 
is  precisely  the  opposite,  that  it  is  self-restraint 
and  self-control  and  self-surrender  that  mark  the 
finest  lives. 

There  is  a  beautiful  story  in  the  life  of  Goldwin 
Smith  that  illustrates  what  I  mean.  In  the  early 
sixties,  when  he  was  one  of  the  keenest  liberal 


32  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

minds  of  England,  he  was  associated  with  Cob- 
den  and  Bright  in  the  Manchester  School.  Again 
and  again  he  found  himself  the  mark  of  the 
bitterest  criticism  from  Disraeli.  Later  Goldwin 
Smith,  resigning  his  professorship  at  Oxford,  came 
to  Canada.  At  that  time  Disraeli's  novel,  "  Lo- 
thair,"  appeared  in  which  he  attacked  Smith — of 
course,  without  using  his  name — as  a  social 
parasite.  It  stung  Smith  to  the  depths  of  his 
soul,  but  as  it  was  an  anonymous  book  there 
was  nothing  he  could  do  but  sit  down  and  write 
this  note  personally  to  Disraeli : 

**  You  well  know  that  if  you  had  ventured  openly  to 
accuse  me  of  any  social  baseness,  you  would  have  had  to 
answer  for  your  words ;  but  when  sheltering  yourself  under 
the  literary  forms  of  a  work  of  fiction,  you  seek  to  traduce 
with  impunity  the  social  character  of  a  poUtical  opponent, 
your  expressions  can  touch  no  man's  honour — they  are  the 
stingless  insults  of  a  coward." 

That  was  all  he  did.  And  yet,  at  that  very 
moment,  Goldwin  Smith  had  in  his  possession 
letters  of  Disraeli,  with  which  he  could  have 
crushed  him.  Openly  in  Parliament  Disraeli 
had  said  that  he  had  never  asked  Peel  for  any 
position.  But  among  Peel's  papers  which  had 
been  placed  in  his  hands  Smith  had  a  letter  in 
which  Disraeli  had  abjectly  begged  Peel  to  give 
him  office.  All  that  Smith  needed  to  do  was  to 
publish  Disraeli's  own  letter  to  Peel  and  it  would 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         23 

have  ruined  Disraeli's  careen  But  to  Goldwin 
Smith  that  was  not  a  noble  thing  to  do.  Peel's 
correspondence  had  not  been  given  to  him  to 
use  in  self-defense,  or  for  any  personal  justifica- 
tion of  his  own,  and  he  repressed  that  letter  until 
Disraeli  was  dead.  Then,  years  after,  all  of  Peel's 
correspondence  was  published  and  the  whole 
world  knew  what  a  gentleman  Goldwin  Smith 
had  been.  Our  modern  ideals  of  what  constitutes 
high  social  and  national  standing  and  character 
say :  "  Fight  fire  with  fire.  Dishonour  releases 
honour  from  itself.  He  struck  you  foul ;  strike 
him  so  in  return."  But  the  man  who  had  learned 
self-restraint  in  the  school  of  God's  loyalty  and 
truth,  who  understood  that  power  is  ours,  not  to 
use  for  self-seeking,  but  for  the  good  of  men  and 
for  God's  honour,  would  not  stoop  to  any  such 
disloyalty  and  shame. 

Once  more.  Whose  judgment  is  of  any  value  ? 
Who  would  have  thought  of  going  to  Adonijah 
and  asking  his  opinion  on  anything  whatsoever? 
He  did  not  know  right  from  wrong.  He  never 
thought  over  the  issues  of  right  or  wrong. 
What  would  I  like  to  do  ?  What  does  passion 
bid  me  do  ?  What  is  my  whim  or  caprice  for  to- 
night ? — that  was  as  far  as  Adonijah  had  ever 
thought.  No  man  would  ever  go  to  him,  as  no 
men  will  ever  come  to  you  and  me  if  we  have 
not  been  trained  in  the  school  of  moral  discrimi- 
nation, if  we  have  not  looked  on  ethical  principle 


24  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

and  duty  in  deciding  the  question  whether  each 
thing-  is  really  right  for  us  and  for  the  whole 
world.  If  we  are  to  be  men  and  women  to  whom 
people  will  come  for  comfort  and  strength  and 
guidance,  to  whom  our  own  children  can  come 
with  assurance  that  they  will  get  the  truth,  we 
must  be  men  and  women  who  now  place  our- 
selves beneath  the  firm  discipline  of  God. 

We  see  all  this  put  simply  in  two  great  things. 
We  see  it  in  our  Lord's  constant  appeal,  while 
here  in  the  world,  for  men  and  women  of  fiber 
and  discipline.  One  came  to  Him  and  said : 
"Lord,  what  shall  I  do  to  inherit  eternal  life?" 
And  Jesus,  looking  upon  him,  loved  him  and 
said  :  "  I  would  not  think  of  counselling  anything 
hard.  You  must  not  sacrifice  anything.  It  is 
all  very  easy.  The  Father  above  is  a  Father  of 
great  tenderness  and  compassion.  He  would 
not  lay  a  straw's  weight  upon  any  child  of  His. 
Go  ;  live  according  to  your  desires  and  by  the 
natural  impulses  of  your  heart,  and  for  that  you 
shall  have  treasure  in  heaven."  Oh,  no  ;  He  did 
not  say  that.  He  said  :  "  Go,  sell  all  that  thou 
hast,  and  come  and  follow  me.  Except  ye  love 
less  than  duty  your  father  and  mother  and  brother 
and  sister,  yea,  and  your  own  life  also,  ye  cannot 
enter  the  kingdom  of  God." 

We  see  it,  too,  in  God's  way  with  men  as  He 
laid  down  His  great  laws  at  the  beginning,  when 
His  people  were  but  as  a  race  of  little  children. 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         25 

Why  did  He  not  say  to  them  :  "  This  ye  may  do. 
The  world  is  sweet  and  fair.  This  ye  may  do, 
and  all  shall  be  easy  to  you "  ?  Why,  on  the 
other  hand,  did  He  speak  to  them  in  the 
stern  admonitions  of  the  Decalogue :  "  Thou 
shalt.  Thou  shalt  not "  ?  God  never  hesitates 
to  lay  His  great  denials  upon  mankind  and  at 
last  to  stifle  us  beneath  the  restraint  of  death  that 
He  may  issue  us  forth  through  that  restraint  into 
the  infinite  liberties  of  the  life  immortal. 

Now  do  not  brush  all  this  away  to-day,  or  any 
day,  light-heartedly,  as  it  can  be  so  easily  brushed 
away.  *'  Oh,  don't  shadow  our  lives,"  you  will 
say,  "with  your  denials  and  your  prohibitions 
and  your  restraints.  Leave  life  free  and  sweet 
as  the  summer  air  and  the  flowers  of  the  field  " — 
that  last  how  long?  No,  my  friends,  it  were  well 
for  us  that  we  should  learn  this  lesson,  and  learn 
it  now,  ere  the  time  comes  when  the  silver  cord 
is  loosed  and  the  wheel  is  broken  at  the  cistern  and 
the  grinders  cease  and  the  long  shadows  fall. 
You  remember  a  tragic  incident  in  New  York  a 
few  years  ago — I  do  not  need  to  recall  the  details 
of  it — when  two  young  lives  made  shipwreck  of 
themselves  just  because  they  thought  that  im- 
pulse and  caprice  were  the  free  voices  that  they 
might  obey.  When  it  was  all  over,  and  the  two 
lives  had  drawn  the  veil  of  night  across  their 
short-lived  evil  joy,  one  of  the  papers  published 
a  letter  which  the  girl  had  written  to  a  friend  : 


26  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

"  My  friend,"  she  wrote,  "  you  and  I  and  Fred,  young, 
heedless,  cynical,  living  in  this  reckless  town  of  New  York, 
may  laugh  sometimes  at  the  old  things  like  law  and  re- 
ligion, when  they  say,  '  Thou  shalt  not.'  We  may  think 
that  phrase  was  written  for  old  fogies,  and  we  may  sneer 
at  '  the  wages  of  sin  is  death ' ;  but,  my  friend,  there 
comes  to  us  some  time  knowledge  that  the  law  and  religion 
are  right.  What  they  say  we  shall  not  do,  we  cannot  do 
without  suffering.  Fred  and  I  have  learned  that.  The 
wages  of  sin  is  death." 

It  is  worse  than  death ;  for  what  was  Hell  in 
that  great  vision  that  John  saw  ?  Why,  nothing 
but  the  removal  of  all  restraint.  "  He  which  is 
filthy,  let  him  be  filthy  still."  He  is  unclean,  let 
him  be  unclean.  He  is  unholy,  let  him  be  un- 
holy. Take  all  the  restraints  away.  That  is 
Hell. 

Away  from  the  dark  gates  that  open  thither 
may  another  voice  call  us  here  to-day,  the  clear, 
strong,  summoning  voice  of  Him  Who  said  of 
Himself :  "  I  came  not  to  do  mine  own  will,  but 
the  will  of  him  that  sent  me,  I  do  always  those 
things  that  please  my  Father,"  and  Who  in  the 
garden  of  Gethsemane,  when  the  anguish  was 
almost  greater  than  He  could  bear,  yet  found  rest 
when  He  prayed,  "  Father,  not  my  will,  but  thine 
be  done  "  ;  that  out  of  the  willfulness  and  capri- 
ciousness  and  the  whim  and  mood  of  our  little 
self-indulgent  lives  we  may  pass  into  the  great, 
strong,  steadfast,  sovereign  will  that  waits  for  us ; 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         27 

that  we  may  stand  fast  and  be  strong  in  the 
strength  and  chastening  of  God  ! 

Now  I  have  put  it — this  matter  of  our  need  of 
discipHne — in  the  most  personal  and  individual 
way,  but  it  is  our  great  national  and  corporate 
need.  The  body  of  a  nation  can  only  exist 
through  the  ordered  discipline  of  its  members 
and  the  spirit  of  a  nation  like  the  spirit  of  a  man 
needs  to  be  cleansed  of  all  the  lusts  of  willfulness 
and  self-indulgence.  The  spirit  of  our  American 
nation  needs  such  cleansing.  Mr.  Kipling  has 
drawn  us  his  picture  of  it : 

**  Through  many  roads,  by  me  possessed, 
He  shambles  forth  in  cosmic  guise ; 
He  is  the  Jester  and  the  Jest, 
And  he  the  Text  himself  applies. 

*'  His  easy  unswept  hearth  he  lends 
From  Labrador  to  Guadaloupe ; 
Till,  elbowed  out  by  sloven  friends, 
He  camps,  at  sufferance,  on  the  stoop. 

"  Calm-eyed  he  scoffs  at  sword  and  crown, 
Or  panic-blinded  stabs  and  slays : 
Blatant  he  bids  the  world  bow  down, 
Or  cringing  begs  a  crust  of  praise ; 

*'  Or,  sombre-drunk,  at  mine  and  mart, 
He  dubs  his  dreary  brethren  Kings. 
His  hands  are  black  with  blood — his  heart 
Leaps,  as  a  babe's,  at  little  things. 

"  But,  through  the  shift  of  mood  and  mood, 
Mine  ancient  humour  saves  him  whole  — 
The  cynic  devil  in  his  blood 

That  bids  him  mock  his  hurrying  soul ; 


28  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

*'  That  bids  him  flout  the  Law  he  makes, 
That  bids  him  make  the  Law  he  flouts, 
Till,  dazed  by  many  doubts,  he  wakes 

The  drumming  guns  that — have  no  doubts ; 

"  That  checks  him  foolish-hot  and  fond, 
That  chuckles  through  his  deepest  ire, 
That  gilds  the  slough  of  his  despond 
But  dims  the  goal  of  his  desire ; 

"  Inopportune,  shrill-accented, 
The  acrid  Asiatic  mirth 
That  leaves  him,  careless  'mid  his  dead, 
The  scandal  of  the  elder  earth." 

Doubtless  we  do  not  like  this  picture.  We  call 
it  a  libel  or  a  caricature.  Let  it  be  so.  Draw 
your  own  picture.  If  there  is  any  truth  or  faith- 
fulness in  it,  if  it  is  not  blind  with  national  vanity 
and  self-deceit,  it  will  still  be  a  revelation  of 
national  need  of  discipline  and  of  self-empire. 

And  how  can  such  discipline  and  self-empire 
be  won  ?  Well,  it  will  not  be  won  on  any  ground 
of  prudential  expediency  or  practical  self-interest. 
It  is  well  for  men  and  nations  to  discern  their 
moral  shortcomings  and  to  realize  their  need  of 
a  new  character.  But  there  are  no  automatic 
processes  of  community  salvation.  The  disci- 
plined nation  comes  in  only  one  way — by  the 
answers  of  individuals  to  the  austere  call  of  the 
one  Person  who  can  remake  character  and  mould 
the  stuff  of  manhood  and  nationality.  The  aus- 
tere call  1  This  is  the  nation's  need  and  it  is 
the  fundamental  summons  and  the  central  note 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         29 

of  Christianity.  "  Then  said  Jesus  unto  his  dis- 
ciples, If  any  man  will  come  after  me,  let  him 
deny  himself,  and  take  up  his  cross,  and  follow 
me." 

The  appeal  of  Christ  was  always  addressed  to 
the  sacrificial  and  the  heroic.  In  every  call 
which  He  issued  to  men  there  is  this  unmis- 
takable note  of  austerity.  He  never  smooths 
things  over  for  the  sake  of  pleasing  people  or  of 
winning  followers.  There  were  times  when  He 
seemed  almost  needlessly  to  draw  in  these  re- 
pelling aspects  of  discipleship,  and  to  make  the 
conditions  of  following  Him  unnecessarily  hard. 
It  is  related  that  it  came  to  pass  that,  as  they 
went  in  the  way,  a  certain  man  said  unto  Him, 
"  Lord,  I  will  follow  thee  whithersoever  thou 
goest."  And  Jesus  said  unto  him,  "  Foxes  have 
holes,  and  birds  of  the  air  have  nests ;  but  the 
Son  of  man  hath  not  where  to  lay  his  head." 
And  He  said  unto  another,  "  Follow  me."  But 
he  said,  "  Lord,  suffer  me  first  to  go  and  bury 
my  father."  Jesus  said  unto  him,  "  Let  the  dead 
bury  their  dead;  but  go  thou  and  preach  the 
■kingdom  of  God."  And  another  also  said, 
"  Lord,  I  will  follow  thee  ;  but  let  me  first  go  bid 
them  farewell  which  are  at  home  at  my  house." 
And  Jesus  said  unto  him,  "  No  man,  having  put 
his  hand  to  the  plough,  and  looking  back,  is  fit 
for  the  kingdom  of  God." 

Christ   never   concealed   His  own  judgments 


30  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

and  convictions  as  to  life's  values  in  these  mat- 
ters, and  spoke  with  the  greatest  scorn  of  all  in- 
dulgence and  softness  of  life.  "  What  went  ye 
out  for  to  see  ?  "  He  asked  the  people,  regarding 
John.  "A  man  clothed  in  soft  raiment?  Be- 
hold, they  that  wear  soft  clothing  are  in  king's 
houses."  He  was  looking  after  men  of  iron  and 
of  austerity.  "  If  any  man  will  come  after  me, 
let  him  deny  himself,  and  take  up  his  cross  and 
follow  me." 

The  beautiful  thing  is  that  this  appeal  of 
Christ's  was  not  futile.  Instead  of  repelling 
men  it  drew  them.  He  actually  obtained  the 
men  whom  He  was  hunting  for,  not  by  offering 
them  worldly  inducements,  not  by  making  such 
appeals  as  anybody  but  Christ  would  have  made, 
but  by  addressing  the  sacrificial  spirit  in  them, 
and  making  an  appeal  to  their  latent  capacity 
for  heroism.  There  is  a  wonderful  tribute  in 
Jesus'  method  to  those  characteristics  in  human 
nature  which  have  never  been  destroyed,  which 
can  answer  to  the  highest  motives,  which  do  not 
need  to  be  bought  by  any  low  compensations, 
but  which  spring  into  full  life  when  appealed  to 
on  the  most  heroic  and  unselfish  plane.  We 
know  how,  in  consequence,  this  exultation  in 
difficulties,  this  love  of  hardship,  this  scorn  of 
ease  became  the  characteristic  note  of  early 
Christianity.  In  the  best  summary  description 
which  Saint  Paul  gives  of  Christian  character 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         31 

and  manhood,  in  the  twelfth  chapter  of  Romans 
we  find  him  speaking  of  "  rejoicing  in  hope  ;  pa- 
tient in  tribulation."  And  when  he  comes  to 
write  his  conception  of  the  character  of  the 
happy  warrior,  we  find  him  setting  this  in  the 
foreground,  "  Endure  hardship,  as  a  good  sol- 
dier of  Jesus  Christ."  The  praise  of  the  New 
Testament  is  never  given  to  those  who  have 
lived  in  luxurious,  indulgent  ease.  It  is  for  that 
little  company  of  men  and  women  who  have 
loved  the  difficult  tasks,  and  who  with  joy  trod 
the  rough  ways  that  transcend  the  stars.  Every 
one  of  the  great  New  Testament  leaders  is  a 
man  who  exalts  for  us  this  same  love  of  moral 
hardship,  this  same  scorn  of  indulgence  and 
smooth  ease,  and  this  same  virtue  of  steadfast- 
ness, "And  not  only  so,"  says  Paul,  "but  we 
glory  in  tribulations  also :  knowing  that  tribula- 
tion worketh  stedfastness  ;  and  stedfastness,  ex- 
perience ;  and  experience,  hope."  And  Peter 
writes,  "  Yea,  and  for  this  very  cause  adding  on 
your  part  all  diligence,  in  your  faith  supply  vir- 
tue ;  and  in  your  virtue  knowledge  ;  and  in  your 
knowledge  self-control ;  and  in  your  self-control 
stedfastness  ;  and  in  your  stedfastness  godliness." 
James  joins  in,  "  My  brethren,  count  it  all  joy 
when  ye  fall  into  divers  temptations  ;  knowing 
this,  that  the  trying  of  your  faith  worketh  pa- 
tience." And  you  remember  the  description 
which   John  gives  of  himself  in  Revelation  as 


32  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

"  your  brother  and  partaker  with  you  in  the 
tribulation  and  kingdom  and  stedfastness  which 
are  in  Jesus." 

Now,  we  ask  ourselves  the  question  why  our 
Lord  poured  out  all  this  scorn  on  what  the  world 
counts  the  desirable  condition  and  atmosphere 
of  life,  why  the  New  Testament  has  no  patience 
with  self-seeking,  indulgence,  contentment,  or 
ease  as  the  standard  of  a  human  life,  why  it 
speaks  contemptuously  of  smooth  ease  of  every 
kind,  and  exalts,  instead,  the  austere  life,  the  life 
of  strength,  and  of  self-discipline,  why  our  Lord 
said  to  men  when  He  came  to  call  them  into  the 
best  thing  there  was  in  the  world,  "  If  any  man 
will  come  after  me,  let  him  deny  himself,  and 
take  up  his  cross  daily,  and  follow  after  me." 

Well,  one  reason  why  the  whole  New  Testa- 
ment pours  out  such  contempt  upon  the  smooth 
life  and  exalts  hardness,  is  because  only  hardness 
can  make  a  great  soul,  and  the  end  of  the  Gos- 
pel, the  end  of  life,  was  the  growing  of  souls. 
The  words  of  Socrates,  understood  in  the  social 
sense  which  he  intended  and  not  selfishly,  con- 
tain the  central  end.  "  For  I  do  nothing,"  said 
he,  "but  go  about  persuading  you  all,  old  and 
young  alike,  not  to  take  thought  for  your  per- 
sons or  your  properties,  but  first  and  chiefly  to 
care  about  the  greatest  improvement  of  the  soul." 
It  is  true,  in  a  sense,  that  we  are  here  for  the 
work  we  can  do,  but  it  is  also  true,  in  a  yet 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         33 

deeper  sense,  that  we  are  here  to  become  the 
best  workmen  that  we  can  become,  and  that  the 
work  we  do  has  a  large  measure  of  its  value  in 
its  reflex  power  of  making  us  capable  of  doing 
better  work.  Evidently  this  is  not  the  real  work- 
shop where  God  needs  His  best  men  and  women. 
When  He  has  perfected  His  workmen  and  work- 
women and  recognizes  that  they  are  prepared  to 
do  their  best  work,  does  He  make  use  of  them 
here  ?  Never.  He  takes  them  elsewhere,  where 
evidently  the  real  work  is  to  be  done.  Every- 
thing we  see  in  this  world  would  seem  to  indi- 
cate that  it  is  only  the  preparatory  school,  a  place 
where  men  and  women  are  equipped  for  the  real 
thing,  that  the  career  that  is  to  abide  lies  else- 
where than  here.  The  purpose  of  these  days  is 
to  make  us  ready  for  the  work  God  has  for  us  to 
do  in  a  larger  sphere  than  this,  where  we  pass 
on,  as  Chinese  Gordon  told  Mr.  Huxley,  to  have 
a  larger  government  given  to  us  to  administer. 
God  pours  out  His  contempt  on  smoothness  of 
life  because  it  cannot  make  greatness  of  soul, 
and  greatness  of  soul  is  one  object  of  our  being 
here. 

The  Christian  ideal  despised,  also,  this  smooth- 
ness which  seems  to  many  of  us  the  most  desir- 
able thing  that  life  has  for  us,  because  there  is 
such  little  knowledge  given  with  it.  At  best  it 
can  only  play  on  the  very  surface  of  life.  We 
know  no  more  than  springs  out  of  the  deep  ex- 


34  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

perience  through  which  we  pass.     You  remem- 
ber the  lines  of  Father  Tabb  : 

«« <  Where  wast  thou,  Httle  song, 
That  hast  delayed  so  long 
To  come  to  me  ?  ' 
*  Mute  ill  the  mind  of  God 
Till  where  thy  feet  had  trod 
I  followed  thee.'  " 

It  is  only  where  we  have  gone  that  we  know 
the  way  ;  it  is  only  the  experience  in  life  that 
we  have  passed  through  that  gives  us  our  true 
knowledge  of  life,  because  the  end  of  life  is  its 
relationships,  and  wealth  of  life  depends  on  the 
breadth  of  true  knowledge  and  the  riches  of  true 
relationship.  Smoothness  of  life  is  simply  dead- 
ening because  it  keeps  us  out  of  what  is  real  life. 

And  Christianity  derided  smoothness  of  life, 
and  scorned  it,  because  it  separates  us  from 
fellowship  with  the  noble  and  suffering  life  of 
God.  You  know  the  long  controversy  in  the- 
ology as  to  whether  the  idea  of  suffering  is  com- 
patible with  the  idea  of  a  perfect  God.  There 
have  been  some  theologians  who  insist  it  could 
not  be  possible  that  God  should  suffer.  If  He 
could  suffer,  He  could  not  be  God..  Well,  I 
suppose  all  of  us  here  are  prepared  without  one 
moment  of  hesitation  to  range  ourselves  on  the 
other  side,  and  to  say  that  if  God  cannot  suffer 
He  cannot  be  our  God.  He  could  not  be  a 
father  if  He  did  not  suffer.     Christ  could  not 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         35 

have  been  the  revelation  of  Him  if  He  is  not  a  suf- 
fering God ;  for  "  He  was  the  man  of  sorrows, 
and  acquainted  with  grief."  What  He  laid  bare 
was  a  heart  of  love  sharing  the  anguish  of  others ; 
for  we  have  not  a  Father  who  cannot  be  touched 
with  the  feeling  of  our  infirmities, — We  can  say 
that  of  Him  because  of  what  we  know  of  Him 
who  revealed  Him, — We  have  not  a  Father  who 
cannot  be  touched  with  the  feeling  of  our  infir- 
mities, no  impassive  God  sitting  where  "  no 
sound  of  human  sorrow  mounts  to  mar  His 
sacred  everlasting  calm,"  but  a  Father  who  pities 
His  children,  who  enters  into  their  life,  and  who 
loves  them  with  all  His  soul.  We  can  have  no 
knowledge  of  that  God,  no  fellowship  with  His 
life,  if  what  we  are  living  is  the  smooth,  easy, 
indulgent  life,  everything  bought  for  us  by 
others,  nothing  done  by  us  for  others,  no  blood 
of  sacrifice  colouring  our  life  red  with  the  glow 
of  God  and  His  incarnate  Son.  The  New  Testa- 
ment despises  the  smooth  life  that  makes  it  im- 
possible for  men  and  women  to  have  any  part  in 
the  deepest  life  of  their  Father. 

And  the  New  Testament  scorns  the  smooth, 
indulgent  life  because  it  cannot  connect  men  and 
women  with  the  real  springs  of  strength  and  of 
power.  No  strong  man  was  ever  made  against 
no  resistance.  We  develop  no  physical  power 
by  putting  forth  no  physical  effort.  All  the 
strength   of   life   we   have   we   get   by    pushing 


36  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

against  opposition.  We  acquire  power  as  we 
draw  it  out  of  deep  experience  and  effort.  And 
the  new  Christian  ideal  made  no  place  for  indul- 
gence and  ease  because  these  things  leave  men 
and  women  weak,  with  no  strength  either  them- 
selves to  bear  or  to  achieve  for  others.  It  is  as 
Mrs.  King  puts  it  in  Ugo  Bassi's  "  Sermon  in 
the  Hospital "  : 

**  The  Vine  from  every  living  limb  bleeds  wine; 
Is  it  the  poorer  for  the  spirit  shed  ? 
The  drunkard  and  the  wanton  drink  thereof; 
Are  they  the  richer  for  that  gift's  excess  ? 
Measure  thy  life  by  loss  instead  of  gain ; 
Not  by  the  wine  drunk,  but  the  wine  poured  forth 
For  love's  strength  standeth  in  love's  sacrifice ; 
And  whoso  suffers  most  hath  most  to  give. 

God  said  to  Man  and  Woman,  '  By  thy  sweat, 
And  by  thy  travail,  thou  shalt  conquer  earth,' 
Not,  by  thy  ease  or  pleasure  :  — and  no  good 
Or  glory  of  this  life  but  comes  by  pain. 
How  poor  were  earth  if  all  its  martrydoms. 
If  all  its  struggling  sighs  of  sacrifice 
Were  swept  away,  and  all  were  satiate-smooth, 
If  this  were  such  a  heaven  of  soul  and  sense 
As  some  have  dreamed  of;  — and  we  human  still. 
Nay,  we  were  fashioned  not  for  perfect  peace 
In  this  world,  howsoever  in  the  next : 
And  what  we  win  and  hold  is  through  some  strife." 

And  it  was  because  our  Lord  knew  this  that  He 
set  over  against  men's  wills  the  strait  door  of  the 
kingdom  of  life.  He  did  not  betray  the  trust 
that  had  been  given  to  Him.     He  did  not  say, 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         87 

"  Come,  I  will  make  life  easy  for  you."  He  did 
not  say,  "  Come,  let  us  indulge  ourselves  to 
heart's  content."  He  said,  "If  any  man  will 
come  after  me,  let  him  leave  all  that  behind,  let 
him  deny  himself,  and  let  him  take  up  his  cross 
daily,  and  let  him  come  after  me." 

Now,  I  know  what  many  of  us  will  be  saying 
of  all  this.  We  will  be  saying,  "  God  did  not 
bring  us  into  the  world  with  any  cross.  All  our 
life  long  has  been  a  sheltered  life.  None  of  this 
hardness  of  which  you  speak  has  ever  come  to 
us.  Maybe  our  fathers  and  mothers  knew  it 
before  us,  but  they  have  shielded  us  from  its 
pressure.  Are  we  to  go  back  to  crudeness  and 
asceticism  for  the  good  of  our  souls  ?  Are  we 
who  have  no  cross  deliberately  to  take  our 
smooth  Hves  and  roughen  them  ? "  Yes,  that  is 
precisely  what  I  am  saying.  Those  of  us  who 
were  not  born  with  a  cross  must  find  one,  those 
whose  lives  have  been  smooth  are  deliberately  to 
find  ways  of  roughening  them,  so  that  we  may 
know  a  life  of  power  and  fellowship  with  the 
suffering  God,  and  can  go  out  to  real  work,  and 
be  prepared  for  that  greater  life  and  greater 
service  which  await  us  elsewhere  than  here. 

We  shall  not  have  any  great  difficulty  in  obey- 
ing this  call  of  Christ  to  roughen  our  lives. 
There  are  many  crosses  in  the  world  too  heavy 
for  the  men  and  women  who  are  trying  to  carry 
them.     We  can  go  out  and  find  one  of  these 


38  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

crosses  and  help  to  bear  it.  They  are  not  far 
away.     Here  is  a  dipping  from  the  New  York 

Sun  : 

"A  comely  young  Hungarian  woman  with  a  three- 
months- old  baby  in  her  arms  dropped  to  the  sidewalk  at 
Fifth  Avenue  and  Fourteenth  Street  late  yesterday  after- 
noon and  lay  half  conscious.  An  ambulance  surgeon  who 
came  said  the  woman  was  starving  and  that  her  baby  had 
bronchitis. 

' '  The  woman  recovered  enough  to  tell  the  surgeon  that 
she  was  Mrs.  Mary  Scheinn,  twenty  years  old,  and  that  her 
husband  had  died  recently.  She  had  been  living  with  a 
friend  at  97  Seigel  Street,  Brooklyn,  she  said,  but  this 
woman  also  was  very  poor  and  expected  to  be  evicted  to- 
day, so  Mrs.  Scheinn  had  walked  to  New  York  to  try  to 
get  her  sick  child  into  a  hospital.  She  tramped  from 
hospital  to  hospital,  and  everywhere  they  refused  to  take 
the  child,  she  said.  But  she  kept  up  the  quest  until  she 
gave  out.  She  had  had  nothing  to  eat  since  yesterday  and 
little  then. 

"  The  ambulance  took  the  woman  and  child  to  Bellevue 
Hospital.     Both  are  in  a  rather  serious  condition." 

Being  young  and  comely,  doubtless,  if  she  had 
not  had  the  baby,  some  pimp  or  other  American 
citizen,  for  a  consideration  within  her  power, 
might  have  helped  her,  but  being  innocent  and 
carrying  a  baby  there  she  stood  until  she  fell 
down,  on  the  corner  of  Fifth  Avenue  and  Four- 
teenth Street,  in  the  heart  of  the  city,  a  woman 
carrying  a  baby  and  a  cross  that  were  too  heavy 
for  her.     There  were  millions  of  Christian  people 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY  39 

round  about  her.  Thousands  of  us  never  knew 
what  a  cross  was  and  we  let  the  woman  with  her 
child  in  her  arms  fall  down  under  the  weight  of 
hers.  This  world  is  black  with  the  shadows  of 
crosses.  If  we  have  none  of  our  own,  in  the 
name  of  the  great  Cross,  let  us  borrow  one. 

Here  is  a  note  from  a  girl.  She  is  one  of 
thousands  and  the  note  is  real.  I  had  been 
speaking  in  one  of  the  New  York  churches  and 
the  next  day  came  a  letter  from  her  asking  me, 
if  I  really  believed  what  I  had  said,  to  answer 
some  questions  for  her.  I  wrote  in  reply  and 
this  was  part  of  her  answer :  "  The  great  trouble 
with  me  is  that  I  have  to  fight  continually 
against  despondency.  Life  to  me  is  a  series  of 
sorrows  and  troubles,  that  accumulate  and  grow 
larger,  and  just  when  I  am  at  the  point  of  giving 
up  altogether  some  little  word  or  act  deters  me. 
...  I  know  I  would  be  happy  if  I  were,  as  you 
say,  truly  trustful  towards  God,  but  God  to  me 
seems  very  far  off  and  rather  mythical.  Your  let- 
ter, also  the  fact  that  you  wrote,  was  a  help  to  me. 
The  part  that  perhaps  appealed  to  me  most  was 
the  idea  that  God  and  God's  love  are  longing 
for  us.  It  is  very  fine  to  feel  that  when  one  is 
always  lonesome."  I  learned  more  of  her  story 
but  it  is  not  for  telling  here.  It  was  a  cross  too 
heavy  for  her  which  she  was  trying  to  bear. 
Women  who  knew  her  lifted  its  weight  for  her, 
taking  it  over  upon  themselves. 


4:0  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

And  not  only  by  taking  up  crosses,  of  which 
the  world  is  full,  can  we  roughen  our  lives. 
Many  of  us  can  do  it  by  simply  cutting  ofl[  some 
of  our  waste  and  extravagance.  There  are  many 
of  us  who  never  ask  before  we  spend  money, 
"  How  can  I  get  the  greatest  return  from  this 
money  ? "  We  waste  it  like  water,  while  Bel- 
gium, Serbia,  Poland  and  Armenia  call.  It  is 
said  that  there  are  thirty  million  people  in  India 
who  have  only  one  meal  a  day,  and  who  never 
know  what  it  is  to  have  enough  to  eat.  Some 
of  them  say  that  if  they  could  have  enough  to 
eat  for  just  two  days,  they  would  be  willing  to 
lie  down  and  die  content.  Again  and  again, 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  people  in  China  have 
been  the  victims  of  famine,  while  we  were  throw- 
ing wealth  away.  We  can  roughen  life  a  bit  by 
denying  ourselves,  by  abridging  expenditure 
and  devoting  the  money  to  human  need  and 
to  some  of  the  services  the  world  is  dying  for. 

Students  often  reject  the  ethical  and  economic 
arguments  against  gambling.  These  arguments 
are  valid  but  it  is  very  hard  to  get  a  clutch  for 
them  on  many  minds.  You  can  point  out  how 
dishonourable  and  essentially  immoral  it  is  for  a 
man  to  have  money  which  he  did  not  earn,  for 
which  he  gave  no  equivalent,  which  came  to 
him  as  no  expression  of  friendship  or  by  no 
legitimate  inheritance.  All  this  is  clear  to  the 
healthy  and  manly  moral  sense.     But  the  gambler 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         41 

does  not  have  such  a  sense.  I  have  often  won- 
dered that  the  case  is  not  more  frequently  put 
from  the  other  side,  from  the  side  of  the  wrong 
of  spending  money  in  gambling.  When  a  man 
has  won  on  a  bet  the  moral  question  is  lulled 
but  when  he  has  lost  there  is  a  chastened  mood 
which  can  be  invited  to  reflect.  What  moral 
warrant  did  he  have  for  throwing  his  money 
away?  What  does  he  have  to  show  for  it? 
A  million  hungry  hands  were  outstretched  to 
him,  a  world  of  want  and  suffering  called 
towards  him  over  land  and  sea  ?  And  he  threw 
his  money  away — got  nothing  for  it,  did  nothing 
with  it.  In  a  world  like  ours,  there  are  parched 
lips  waiting  for  drink ;  there  are  hungry  mouths 
in  need  of  bread  : — do  we  have  any  right  to  waste 
in  indulgence  in  a  world  like  this  ?  Men  should 
scrutinize  every  dollar  that  passes  through  their 
hands  and  ask,  "What  is  the  very  best  thing 
that  I  can  do  with  this  ?  " 

And  frugality,  self-imposed  for  the  sake  of 
service,  will  come  back  to  us  in  rich  reward  in 
character  and  power.  Horace  Bushnell  drew  a 
noble  picture  of  the  fruitage  of  true  parsimony 
in  his  address  at  the  Litchfield  County  Centennial 
in  1851,  on  "The  Age  of  Homespun"  : 

"  It  was  also  a  great  point,  in  this  homespun 
mode  of  life,  that  it  imparted  exactly  what  many 
speak  of  only  with  contempt,  a  closely  girded 
habit  of  economy.     Harnessed,  all  together,  into 


42  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

the  producing  process,  young  and  old,  male  and 
female,  from  the  boy  that  rode  the  plow-horse, 
to  the  grandmother  knitting  under  her  spectacles, 
they  had  no  conception  of  squandering  lightly 
what  they  all  had  been  at  work,  thread  by  thread, 
and  grain  by  grain,  to  produce.  They  knew  too 
exactly  what  everything  cost,  even  small  things, 
not  to  husband  them  carefully.  Men  of  patri- 
mony in  the  great  world,  therefore,  noticing 
their  small  way  in  trade,  or  expenditure,  are 
ready,  as  we  often  see,  to  charge  them  with 
meanness — simply  because  they  knew  things 
only  in  the  small ;  or,  what  is  not  far  different, 
because  they  were  too  simple  and  rustic  to  have 
any  conception  of  the  big  operations  by  which 
other  men  are  wont  to  get  their  money  without 
earning  it,  and  lavish  the  more  freely  because  it 
was  not  earned.  Still,  this  knowing  life  only  in 
the  small,  it  will  be  found,  is  really  anything  but 
meanness. 

"  Probably  enough  the  man  who  is  heard 
threshing  in  his  barn  of  a  winter  evening,  by  the 
light  of  a  lantern,  (I  knew  such  an  example)  will 
be  seen  driving  his  team  next  day,  the  coldest 
day  of  the  year,  through  the  deep  snow  to  a 
distant  wood-lot  to  draw  a  load  for  a  present  to 
his  minister.  So  the  housewife  that  higgles  for 
a  half  hour  with  the  merchant  over  some  small 
trade  is  yet  one  that  will  keep  watch,  not  un- 
likely, when  the  schoolmaster,  boarding  round 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         43 

the  district,  comes  to  some  hard  quarter,  and 
commence  asking  him  to  dinner,  then  to  tea, 
then  to  stay  over  night,  and  Hterally  boarding 
him,  till  the  hard  quarter  is  passed.  Who  now, 
in  the  great  world  of  money,  will  do,  not  to  say 
the  same,  as  much,  proportionally  as  much,  in 
any  of  the  pure  hospitalities  of  life  ? 

"  Besides,  what  sufficiently  disproves  any  real 
meanness,  it  will  be  found  that  children  brought 
up,  in  this  way,  to  know  things  in  the  small — 
what  they  cost  and  what  is  their  value — have,  in 
just  that  fact,  one  of  the  best  securities  of  char- 
acter and  most  certain  elements  of  power  and 
success  in  life ;  because  they  expect  to  get  on  by 
small  advances  followed  up  and  saved  by  others, 
not  by  sudden  leaps  of  fortune  that  despise  the 
slow  but  surer  methods  of  industry  and  merit. 
When  the  hard,  wiry-looking  patriarch  of  home- 
spun, for  example,  sets  off  for  Hartford,  or  Bridge- 
port, to  exchange  the  little  surplus  of  his  year's 
production,  carrying  his  provision  with  him  and 
the  fodder  for  his  team,  and  taking  his  boy  along 
to  show  him  the  great  world,  you  may  laugh  at 
the  simplicity,  or  pity,  if  you  will,  the  sordid  look 
of  the  picture ;  but,  five  or  ten  years  hence,  this 
boy  will  probably  enough  be  found  in  college, 
digging  out  the  cent's  worths  of  his  father's 
money  in  hard  study ;  and  some  twenty  years 
later  he  will  be  returning,  in  his  honours,  as  the 
celebrated  Judge,  or  Governor,  or  Senator  and 


M  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

public  orator,  from  some  one  of  the  great  states 
of  the  republic,  to  bless  the  sight  once  more  of 
that  venerated  pair  who  shaped  his  beginnings, 
and  planted  the  small  seeds  of  his  future  success. 
Small  seeds,  you  may  have  thought,  of  mean- 
ness ;  but  now  they  have  grown  up  and  blos- 
somed into  a  large-minded  life,  a  generous  public 
devotion,  and  a  free  benevolence  to  mankind. 

"  And  just  here,  I  am  persuaded,  is  the  secret, 
in  no  small  degree,  of  the  very  peculiar  success 
that  has  distinguished  the  sons  of  Connecticut, 
and,  not  least,  those  of  Litchfield  County,  in 
their  migration  to  other  states.  It  is  because 
they  have  gone  out  in  the  wise  economy  of  a 
simple,  homespun  training,  expecting  to  get  on 
in  the  world  by  merit  and  patience,  and  by  a 
careful  husbanding  of  small  advances ;  secured 
in  their  virtue  by  just  that  which  makes  their 
perseverance  successful.  For  the  men  who  see 
the  great  in  the  small,  and  go  on  to  build  the 
great  by  small  increments,  and  so  form  a  char- 
acter of  integrity  before  God  and  men,  as  solid 
and  massive  as  the  outward  successes  they  con- 
quer. The  great  men  who  think  to  be  great  in 
general,  having  yet  nothing  great  in  particular, 
are  a  much  more  windy  affair." 

Every  one  ought  to  roughen  life  by  friendships 
that  will  bring  into  it  those  influences  which  are 
not  naturally  in  our  daily  associations  and  will 
carry  us  into  contact  with  men  and  women  who 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         45 

struggle  harder  than  we  do.  A  few  such  friend- 
ships will  help  to  keep  life  from  petrification  and 
to  make  us  aware  that  the  world  is  under  a  cross, 
and  that  our  hearts  must  be  as  open  to  all  its 
needs  as  the  heart  of  the  Father  of  human  life  is 
open  always. 

And  we  can  help  to  roughen  our  lives  in  the 
very  sense  in  which  Christ  meant  them  to  be 
roughened  if  we  will  resist  the  steadily  increasing 
tendency  of  our  day  to  multiply  ways  in  which 
we  are  released  from  doing  things  for  ourselves. 
There  are  none  of  us  who  do  not  have  a  hundred 
things  done  for  us  that  our  fathers  and  mothers 
had  to  do  for  themselves.  Litde  by  little,  we  are 
ridding  ourselves  of  the  responsibility  of  doing 
any  service  for  ourselves  whatsoever.  There  is 
immense  gain  in  this.  It  gives  freedom  for  larger 
living  but  it  can  go  too  far,  and  it  would  be  a 
great  thing  if  we  resolved  at  periods  that  we 
would  not  let  anybody  else  do  for  us  what  we 
could  do  for  ourselves.  There  was  a  day,  per- 
haps, when  men  needed  the  other  rule,  when  it 
was  a  great  deal  better  to  get  other  people  to  do 
things  for  us  than  to  do  them  ourselves,  but  the 
time  has  come  when  the  world  needs  to  reverse 
that  principle.  What  the  world  wants  is  not 
organizers,  but  deorganizers,  men  and  women 
who  will  increase  the  number  of  personal  services 
and  activities,  and  who  will  bring  something 
frugal,  simple  and  elementary  back  into  life  to 


4:6  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

deliver  us  from  the  false  heaven  of  ease  and  self- 
indulgence,  which  is  as  bad  as  any  other  kind  of 
hell.     Christ  came  to  save  us  from  that. 

There  is  one  other  way  in  which  we  can  an- 
swer this  call,  and  can  deliver  ourselves  from  the 
curse  of  smooth  living.  Around  about  us  on 
every  side  there  are  causes  waiting  for  what  men 
and  women  can  do  for  them.  I  do  not  mean 
crosses  in  any  great,  general,  organized  sense,  in 
which  we  send  our  five,  our  twenty-five  or  our 
hundred  dollars  to  some  society  and  think  we 
have,  in  that  way,  carried  all  the  cross  that  Christ 
means  to  have  us  carry.  We  cannot  fulfill  Christ's 
command  by  paying  an  organization  to  carry  a 
cross  for  us.  All  the  work  they  do  must  be  done, 
and  it  must  be  supported.  Millions  of  dollars 
that  are  not  being  given  now  ought  to  be  given. 
But  what  Christ  is  waiting  for  also  and  what  we 
have  got  to  do  if  we  are  to  have  the  satisfaction 
of  the  enduring  life  is  to  find  each  of  us  for  him- 
self some  true  cross  of  personal  service.  There 
are  men  and  women  around  us  who  are  waiting 
for  some  touch  of  sympathy,  some  kindness, 
some  unflinching  word  of  ours  to  them  that  shall 
mean  the  awakening  of  their  own  discouraged  or 
sleeping  souls,  that  they  may  come  out  to  live. 
"  If  any  man  will  come  after  me,  let  him  deny 
himself,  and  take  up  his  cross  and  follow  me." 

One  of  the  saddest  things  in  the  world  to-day 
is  the  principle  under  which  those  are  living  who 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         47 

are  unwilling  to  bear  these  crosses  and  to  bring 
home  into  their  lives  the  wholesome  spiritual 
stimulus  that  this  roughening  of  life  alone  can 
give  to  them.  We  have  reacted  too  far  from 
the  old  monastic  idea.  Men  speak  with  scorn 
now  of  those  men  and  women  who  went  away 
into  monasteries  and  convents,  despising  the  joys 
of  the  world  for  the  sake  of  their  souls.  But 
these  men  and  women  were  infinitely  better  than 
the  great  multitudes  who  go  out  into  the  world 
to-day,  despising  their  souls  for  the  sake  of  the 
joys  of  the  world.  If  a  man  or  woman  wants  to 
do  any  despising  it  is  better  to  despise  the  world 
than  the  soul.  It  were  well  for  us  to  go  back  a 
little  to  the  spirit  of  the  mediaeval  time.  When 
that  spirit  was  pure  and  good  the  world's  richest 
service  flowed  out  from  it. 

The  glory  of  life  for  us  consists  in  finding  the 
rough,  the  morally  austere  things  in  life  and  then 
fearlessly  and  unhesitatingly  doing  them.  There 
is  no  splendour  in  the  easy  indulgent  way.  The 
splendour  lies  in  finding  the  hard  thing  to  be 
achieved  and  revelling  in  it. 

Many  years  ago  I  clipped  this  story  from  the 
editorials  of  what  was  then  our  ablest  news- 
paper : 

"  A  young  Briton  named  Felix  Oswald  became 
interested  a  while  ago  in  the  geology  of  Turkish 
Armenia.  He  made  long  journeys  through  that 
country  and  finally  came  home  with  an  important 


48  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

amount  of  valuable  new  material.  It  was  not 
matter,  however,  that  would  find  favour  in  the 
eyes  of  the  general  publisher  and  Mr.  Oswald 
had  to  undertake  its  publication  himself.  He 
had  the  type  set  at  the  lowest  rates  in  a  small 
town.  There  were  516  pages  of  print  and  the 
author  undertook  the  large  task  of  doing  the 
printing  himself.  He  hired  a  hand  press  and 
after  weeks  of  hard  work  he  had  produced  loi 
copies  of  the  book.  Feeling  certain  that  this 
edition  would  fill  the  demand  he  went  about  the 
next  large  job,  which  was  the  hand  colouring  of 
all  his  maps  and  profiles.  Then  the  copies  were 
bound  and  the  book  was  out. 

"  Leading  geologists  say  that  the  work  is  one 
of  the  best  of  its  kind.  The  small  edition  is  ex- 
hausted and  the  book  will  not  be  reprinted.  The 
editor  of  Peterma7in' s  Mitteilungen,  believing 
that  a  wide  circle  of  geologists  would  be  glad  to 
have  the  important  results  of  Oswald's  investiga- 
tions, has  just  printed  in  his  periodical  an  ex- 
tended resume  of  them  together  with  some  of 
the  maps.  The  University  of  London  has 
crowned  the  work  with  its  approval  by  con- 
ferring the  degree  of  Doctor  of  Science  upon  the 
author.  Oswald  has  certainly  earned  the  con- 
gratulations of  all  who  admire  the  qualities  of 
courage,  perseverance  and  intelligent  devotion 
to  a  special  task." 

A  man  does  not  have  to  go  to  Armenia  to  find 


DISCIPLINE  AND  AUSTERITY         49 

the  hard  thing  to  do,  although  there  are  harder 
and  nobler  tasks  waiting  there  to-day  than 
Oswald  undertook,  tasks  that  are  crosses  in  the 
divinest  sense,  scarred  with  sorrow  and  grief. 
And  perhaps  there  are  some  among  us  here  now 
who  are  bearing  crosses  and  finding  them  be- 
yond their  strength.  But  they  are  not  to  be 
mourned  over.  They  were  not  of  our  making, 
were  they  ?  If  they  were  of  our  making,  per- 
haps there  is  some  penitence  to  be  felt,  some 
restitution  to  be  made.  If  they  were  not  of  our 
making,  we  may  be  sure  that  they  were  built 
just  for  our  shoulder,  that  One  who  knew  us 
made  them  that  we  might  carry  them,  and  be- 
come under  them  what  we  could  never  become 
without  them.  And  if  we  have  no  such  cross, 
out  from  our  smooth  and  easy  living,  our  cozy 
shelters  in  which  we  have  been  kept  and  are  kept 
now.  One  is  calling  us  to  come  whose  ancient 
word  we  hear  to-day:  "I  came  not  to  send 
peace,  but  a  sword.  Whosoever  would  be  my 
disciple  must  love  nothing  as  much  as  me,  and 
must  be  willing  to  rise  up  and  follow  me."  For 
men  and  women  who  will  do  this  in  the  full  and 
joyous  spirit  of  Francis  of  Assisi  but  in  the  forms 
suitable  to  our  modern  life  the  summons  of  God 
and  the  world  is  clear. 


LECTURE  II 

THE  CONSERVATION  AND  RELEASE 
OF  MORAL  RESOURCES 

ONE  of  our  most  familiar  national  ideas 
during  recent  years  has  been  the  con- 
servation of  our  natural  resources,  our 
mines,  our  forests,  our  water  power,  the  agri- 
cultural capacities  of  our  soil.  It  would  have 
been  a  good  thing  if  this  idea  had  occurred  to 
us  fifty  years  earlier.  But  it  is  an  idea  which 
always  comes  late  to  a  young  nation.  So  long 
as  the  population  is  sparse  and  the  supply  of 
good  land  unlimited  and  it  is  an  easy  thing  to 
pick  up  a  living  from  the  surface  of  the  ground, 
perhaps  it  is  too  much  to  expect  that  any  people 
would  be  careful  and  frugal.  But  when  the 
population  has  increased  and  begins  to  press 
against  the  means  of  subsistence,  when  the  good 
public  lands  are  exhausted  and  a  mere  living  be- 
comes harder  for  the  masses  of  the  people  to 
secure,  then  any  nation  awakens  to  wisdom  and 
turns  from  recklessness  and  prodigality. 

And,  doubtless,  the  idea  would  have  occurred 
to  us  a  full  generation  earlier  if  it  had  not  been 
for  the  terrible  education  of  our  Civil  War. 
There   is   a   great  deal  to  be  set  down  on  the 

50 


MORAL  RESOURCES  51 

good  side  of  the  account  of  the  Civil  War.  It 
took  the  putty  of  our  national  character  and 
burned  it  into  stone.  It  ran  steel  fibres  through 
our  national  life.  And  it  brought  us  for  the  first 
time  to  a  sense  of  national  unity.  But  alas  there 
is  a  great  deal  also  on  the  ledger's  other  page. 
For  war  is  not  conservation,  it  is  destruction.  It 
educates  any  people  not  in  frugality  but  in  waste- 
fulness. Military  supplies  must  be  bought  at  once 
at  any  cost.  Everything  is  thrown  away  with  a 
negligent  and  wasteful  hand.  And  so  long  as 
any  people  is  pouring  out  its  best  possession, 
the  precious  life-blood  of  its  sons,  like  water  on 
the  battle-field,  you  cannot  expect  it  to  be  saving 
and  careful  in  its  material  possessions. 

The  days  of  waste  that  followed  the  Civil  War 
are  gone  forever.  The  nation  has  begun  now  to 
count  carefully  the  amount  of  its  available  wealth. 
We  have  seen  calculations  of  how  many  millions 
of  feet  of  lumber  we  have  standing  in  our  forests 
and  how  many  millions  of  tons  of  coal  we  have 
still  hid  away  in  our  treasure  houses  under- 
ground. And  far  and  wide  over  the  nation  now 
we  are  learning  to  husband  the  resources  we 
have  left,  mindful  of  our  children  who  are  to 
come  after  us. 

And  it  is  a  good  thing  that  the  nation  in  con- 
serving her  resources  realizes  that  there  is  some- 
thing more  important  than  a  careful  husbanding 
of  her  mere  material  wealth.     The  vital  resources 


52  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

of  any  people  are  of  more  significance  to  her 
than  clods  of  coal,  or  timber  on  her  hillsides. 
Of  what  use  would  it  be  to  conserve  the  material 
resources  of  any  nation  if  we  conserve  them  only 
for  a  deteriorating  racial  stock  ?  The  nation  has 
come  to  realize  that  the  men  and  women  who 
compose  it  are  its  largest  wealth,  and  that  this 
treasure  must  be  guarded  more  sacredly  than 
our  mines,  our  forests,  or  our  water  power.  We 
have  seen,  accordingly,  a  whole  new  body  of 
legislation  growing  up,  that  would  have  made 
our  fathers  stand  aghast,  fixing  the  conditions  of 
employment,  the  age  of  employees,  the  sanitary 
condition  of  homes  and  mills,  the  hours  of  work 
and  the  care  of  women.  The  expenditure  of  im- 
mense sums  for  the  protection  of  the  life  and 
health  of  factory  labourers  is  now  readily  recog- 
nized even  by  "  soul-less  corporations,"  which 
formerly  fought  against  all  such  outlay,  as  money 
well  invested.  In  all  the  nation  to-day  we 
realize  that  there  is  a  more  precious  wealth  than 
our  material  wealth.  I  saw  an  interesting  illus- 
tration of  this  new  frame  of  mind  a  little  while 
ago  in  a  statement  issued  by  some  leading  men 
in  Tennessee  dealing  with  the  excessive  death 
rate  among  the  negroes  of  the  South.  They 
pointed  out  that  among  nine  millions  of  white 
people  the  death  rate  is  160,000,  and  that  among 
the  nine  millions  of  the  negroes  the  death  rate  is 
266,000.     In  other  words,  among  the  negroes, 


MORAL  RESOURCES  53 

106,000  more  people  die  every  year  than  among 
a  corresponding  number  of  tlie  whites  of  our 
country.  In  the  negro,  these  men  argued,  the 
South  had  an  invaluable  asset,  a  better  type  of 
labour  on  the  whole,  with  all  its  drawbacks,  than 
any  other  section  of  the  nation  possessed,  more 
docile,  more  faithful,  less  troublesome,  and  the 
South  could  not  afford  to  lose  this  labour  which 
it  needed  for  developing  its  wealth.  These  men 
estimated  the  economic  value  of  each  one  of 
these  lives  at  $350  a  year,  and  the  period  of  that 
economic  value  at  ten  years,  so  that  each  one  of 
these  wasted  lives  was  a  loss  of  $3,500  to  the 
South,  or  $371,000,000  each  year,  one  million 
dollars  a  day,  and  they  argued  that  the  South 
could  not  afford  such  a  waste.  The  South,  they 
held,  must  see  that  the  death  rate  among  the 
negro  is  reduced  to  the  same  proportions  as  the 
death  rate  among  the  white  people,  in  order  that 
such  an  enormous  economic  loss  might  be  averted. 
We  are  realizing  all  over  the  nation  now  that  a 
man  is  a  very  costly  product.  You  can  breed  an 
animal  in  a  few  months  for  the  market,  but  it 
takes  twenty  years  to  grow  a  man,  and  no  na- 
tion can  afford  to  throw  away  such  costly  prod- 
ucts as  men  and  women.  These  are  its  most 
priceless  wealth.  If  it  expects  to  conserve  its 
treasures  and  to  be  prepared  for  the  services  of 
the  days  to  come,  it  is  bound  to  guard  this  wealth 
more  sacredly  than  any  other.     And  American 


54  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

capital  and  industry  have  come  to  see  this 
clearly.  Here  is  one  typical  utterance  by  a 
leading  engineer  at  a  meeting  of  the  Immigra- 
tion Committee  of  the  Chamber  of  Commerce  of 
the  United  States : 

"Industrial  Americanization  is  a  part  of  the  prevalent 
present-day  movement  towards  the  humanizing  of  industry. 
It  aims  to  make  what  is  commonly  called  *  welfare  work ' 
not  an  exercise  of  the  individual  employer's  '  paternalism,' 
but  a  legitimate  kind  of  business  organization  everywhere. 
There  are  now  innumerable  kinds  of '  welfare  work.'  One 
employer  does  it  from  the  point  of  view  of  '  good  busi- 
ness ' ;  another  on  the  '  big  brothers  '  theory.  One  man 
confines  himself  to  playgrounds,  another  to  safety  appli- 
ances. In  one  firm  it  is  under  the  employment  manager; 
in  another  under  a  Y.  M.  C.  A.  director ;  and  in  a 
number  of  other  firms  it  is  classified  in  as  many  different 
ways. 

"  There  is  no  agreement  among  American  employers  as 
to  where  the  organization  of  the  human  side  of  industry 
really  belongs.  And  there  are  absolutely  no  standards  for 
it.  What  we  need  to  do  is  to  extend  scientific  methods  to 
the  human  phases  of  industrial  organization,  and  thus  give 
*  welfare  work '  a  definite  place  and  definite  standards. 
The  engineer  as  the  '  consulting  mind  '  of  industry  must 
be  the  leader  in  this  work.  It  is  he  who  determines  the 
site  of  the  plant  and  its  construction.  Inside  the  plant 
again,  the  engineer  has  much  to  do  with  efficiency  methods. 
No  efficiency  methods  that  are  unrelated  to  the  men  in  the 
plant  can  prosper  permanently." 

But  there  is  another  sort  of  resource  and  na- 
tional treasure  greater  by  far  than  these,  which 


MORAL  RESOURCES  55 

most  of  the  nations  are  passing  by.  I  mean  the 
latent  and  undeveloped  capacities  for  ministry 
and  achievement  which  lie  dormant  inside  hu- 
man life.  Every  life  is  a  reservoir  of  unawakened 
possibilities.  There  is  no  one  of  us  that  is  more 
than  a  fraction  of  the  man  he  should  be.  There 
is  not  one  who  is  not  falling  short  by  a  wide 
margin  of  the  ideals  that  he  ought  to  attain,  not 
one  who  is  making  the  contribution  to  the  nation 
or  building  the  share  in  the  Kingdom  of  God  that 
God  and  mankind  alike  have  a  right  to  expect 
of  him.  Not  long  before  his  death,  an  article 
contributed  by  Prof.  William  James,  of  Harvard, 
appeared  in  the  American  Magazine,  entitled 
"  The  Powers  of  Man,"  in  which  Professor  James 
argued  that  mankind  is  living  on  a  very  small 
fraction  of  its  vitality,  and  that  there  are  buried 
underground  strata  of  possibilities  and  of  power 
which  are  never  tapped  except  in  times  of  great 
emergency.  For  a  little  time  then  a  man  draws 
on  these  reserves,  and  then  seals  the  strata  over 
again  and  falls  back  on  the  surface  levels  once 
more.  For  illustration  he  spoke  of  the  familiar 
phenomenon  of  the  second  wind.  Every  boy 
can  remember  such  experiences.  There  came  a 
time  in  the  game  when  he  was  "  all  in."  He  had 
done  his  best  and  drawn  on  his  last  available 
power.  Suddenly  it  was  as  though  something 
broke.  A  partition  wall  fell  in.  Unsuspected 
reserves  were  released.    The  second  wind  came 


66  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

and  reservoirs  of  power  that  had  been  withheld 
came  unexpectedly  into  play  and  he  did  better 
than  he  had  done  before,  what  he  had  never  been 
able  to  do  before.  That  is  an  absolute  truth  of  ex- 
perience all  through  life.  In  our  great  crises,  any 
one  of  many  forces  may  unlock  these  energies 
and  let  them  loose.  And  the  present  needed  ap- 
peal of  the  world  is  to  men  and  women  that  they 
should  not  be  content  to  draw  upon  these  reser- 
voirs in  crises  alone.  The  tragic  crises  come  be- 
cause these  powers  are  not  drawn  forth  and  used. 
The  great  wealth  of  the  nations  and  of  the  world 
that  needs  now  to  be  unsealed  is  just  this  wealth 
of  moral  capacity  lying  latent  and  dormant 
within. 

What  I  have  been  saying  is  certainly  true  in 
the  realm  of  our  physical  energies.  I  remember 
a  story  of  John  Lawrence,  who  went  out  to  India 
a  raw,  uninfluential  Irish  boy  in  the  service  of 
the  East  India  Company,  resolved  to  do  his  work 
well  and  make  himself  a  name.  Very  early  in 
his  career  he  was  assigned  to  the  coUectorship  of 
the  Jullundur  Doab,  on  what  was  then  the  frontier 
of  India.  He  made  himself  perfectly  at  home 
among  his  people,  entering  into  their  life,  mas- 
tering their  vernaculars,  learning  their  secrets, 
until  at  last  men  came  to  think  of  "  Jans  Larens  " 
as  a  demi-god  with  powers  beyond  the  knowledge 
of  common  men.  One  day  as  he  was  sitting  in 
his  house  a  messenger  came  in  from  one  of  his 


MORAL  RESOURCES  57 

districts  and  reported  that  a  village  was  burning 
down  and  begged  him  to  come.  He  hurried  out 
to  the  village.  When  he  arrived  he  asked  the 
headmen  if  they  had  all  the  people  out  of  the 
houses  and  was  told  that  all  had  been  brought 
out  except  one  old  woman  who  refused  to  come. 
He  went  to  the  house  where  the  woman  lived 
and  looked  in.  There  she  sat  on  a  bag  of  grain. 
Lawrence  entreated  her  to  come  out  but  she  re- 
fused, explaining  that  this  bag  of  grain  was  all 
her  earthly  wealth.  If  she  came  out  she  would 
starve ;  she  would  rather  stay  and  be  burned. 
When  Lawrence  found  his  commands  and  en- 
treaties unavailing,  he  rushed  in,  with  the  embers 
from  the  burning  roof  falling  on  his  shoulders, 
stooped  over  and  picked  up  the  bag  of  grain, 
and  left  the  burning  building,  the  old  woman  fol- 
lowing obediently  behind.  The  next  day  as  he 
was  sitting  in  his  house  it  flashed  on  his  mind 
that  the  bag  of  grain  had  been  exceedingly  heavy 
and  he  rode  out  curiously  to  the  village  again  to 
see  how  much  he  had  lifted.  He  had  no  difficulty 
in  finding  the  old  woman  and  her  bag  of  grain. 
He  stooped  over  to  lift  it  but  could  not  budge  it 
from  the  ground.  But  the  day  before  he  had 
budged  it.  He  had  picked  it  up  and  carried  it. 
The  power  to  do  it  was  lying  latent  in  him  all 
the  while.  All  he  needed  was  just  the  piercing 
call  or  inspiration  adequate  to  release  the  buried 
energy. 


68  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

And  the  world  is  full  of  evidences  that  what  is 
true  physically  is  true  morally.  In  every  man 
lies  the  power  with  the  grace  and  help  of  God  to 
meet  his  great  crisis  and  in  every  woman  the 
power  to  bear  the  agony  and  pain  of  her  great 
hour.  Only  a  few  years  ago,  when  the  Titanic 
went  down  and  some  men  who  had  walked  as  dogs 
at  the  heel  of  their  passions  suddenly  became  mas- 
ters of  themselves  and  laughing  stood  at  atten- 
tion to  death  as  they  waited  on  the  deck,  we  all 
wondered  what  it  was  that  gave  these  men  who 
had  been  slaves  their  sudden  moral  mastery. 
That  mastery  was  within  all  the  time.  It  did  not 
come  out  of  the  frame  of  the  Titanic.  It  did  not 
come  out  of  the  iceberg.  It  was  lying  buried  all 
the  while  only  waiting  the  hour  and  the  Voice 
that  was  to  summon  it  to  come  forth. 

Among  the  nations  to-day  this  is  the  needed 
truth  as  it  is  the  needed  truth  here  in  our  own 
lives.  There  are  boys  here  to-day  who  have  been 
yielding  to  temptation,  to  whom  God  would  give 
energies  to  withstand  their  enemy.  In  the  na- 
tion there  are  even  now  capacities  to  conquer  all 
the  evils  with  which  the  nation  abounds.  Some 
day  our  children  will  look  back  and  ask  why  we 
have  allowed  immorality  to  dominate  the  moral 
life  of  the  land  and  why  in  the  world  we  have  en- 
dured the  saloon  so  long.  These  things  will  be 
cleaned  away  some  day  and  men  will  wonder 
then  what  their  mothers  and  fathers  were  about 


MORAL  RESOURCES  59 

that  they  surrendered  where  that  happier  genera- 
tion will  not  surrender  but  will  achieve.  The 
needed  capacities  are  buried  of  God  in  life,  but 
we  are  not  willing  to  believe  that  they  are  there 
or  to  have  faith  in  Him  to  energize  them. 

Let  me  put  the  truth  in  yet  a  different  way. 

Last  spring,  just  after  Holy  Week,  I  received 
a  very  interesting  letter  from  a  friend  who  is  one 
of  the  best  known  and  best  loved  judges  in  our 
country.  It  was  written  on  the  Saturday  be- 
tween Good  Friday  and  Easter  Day,  and  he 
said  in  it  that  he  was  pursuing  the  practice 
which  he  had  pursued  for  many  years,  of  trying 
in  the  interval  between  Good  Friday  and  Easter 
morning  to  eliminate  Jesus  Christ  entirely  from 
his  thought  of  life  and  of  the  world  in  order  that 
he  might  thus  bring  home  to  his  own  mind  and 
conscience  more  deeply  the  significance  of  Jesus, 
and  he  said  he  could  hardly  wait  for  Easter 
morning  to  come  to  escape  from  the  oppressive 
gloom  and  depression  in  which  his  spirit  was  as 
a  result  of  his  enforced  practice.  And  he  begged 
me,  as  one  of  his  friends,  to  try  this  between  the 
next  Good  Friday  and  Easter  Day  and  to  see 
what  the  experience  would  mean. 

Oddly  enough  my  own  thoughts  that  same 
day  on  which  my  friend  was  writing  this  letter 
were  exactly  the  opposite  of  his.  He  was  think- 
ing of  Jesus  Christ  as  extinguished,  he  was 
thinking  of  all  that  He  had  come  to  be  and  to 


60  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

do  as  gone,  and  he  was  trying  to  bring  home  to 
his  own  heart  what  this  utter  loss  of  Christ  would 
mean.  I  was  meditating,  on  the  other  hand,  on 
that  Saturday  morning,  on  just  the  contrary  idea. 
On  Good  Friday,  the  day  before  this  Saturday, 
there  had  been  a  great  Personahty ;  now  that 
PersonaHty  must  be  somewhere  still.  Person- 
ality does  not  die.  The  next  day,  on  Easter 
morning,  there  was  to  be  a  great  outburst  of  en- 
ergy. That  energy  must  be  somewhere  now. 
It  will  not  be  created  to-morrow  morning.  It 
must  be  somewhere  to-day  waiting  to  come 
forth  to-morrow.  Where  is  it  ?  And  then  I  sud- 
denly realized  that  it  was  all  there,  that  all  that 
was  to  break  loose  Easter  morning  was  shut  up 
inside  that  grave,  that  all  the  energies  that  were 
to  peal  across  the  world  on  the  new  day  were 
there  asleep  in  that  tomb  that  Saturday.  All 
the  great  love  and  power  that  had  been  had  not 
been  annihilated.  It  was  there  somewhere,  only 
out  of  sight  for  a  little  while.  And  the  great 
truth  urged  itself  that  all  the  dormant  energies 
of  life,  all  the  enshrouded  and  enfolded  powers 
are  here  now  and  always  just  as  truly  as  they 
will  be  to-morrow  when  they  awake,  though  for 
the  hour  they  lie  latent  and  unused. 

Then  I  began  to  see,  as  one's  thought  ran 
easily  on,  that  that  Saturday  between  Good 
Friday  and  Easter  Day  was  in  reality  a  sort  of 
symbol  of  the  whole  of  history.     For  history,  as 


MORAL  RESOURCES  61 

we  look  back  upon  it,  is  full  of  these  repressions 
and  these  emergences,  and  then  perhaps  repres- 
sions again,  of  great  impulses  and  outbursts  of 
energy  and  of  power.  Now  and  then  they  are 
for  good,  as  when  the  Reformation  broke  across 
men's  minds,  shattering  their  shackles,  opening 
old  prison  doors,  allowing  the  enslaved  human 
spirit  to  come  out  and  breathe  the  air  of  free- 
dom. But  why  had  it  not  come  before  ?  All 
the  great  energies  of  God  that  burst  forth  in  it 
must  have  been  here  even  before  that  hour. 
And  why  did  they  have  to  subside  afterwards  ? 
They  all  were  still  ?  Why  might  they  not  have 
gone  beating  their  way  onward  and  not  have 
ceased  so  soon  ? 

Then  also  great  explosions  of  evil  come.  We 
look  out  across  the  world  to-day  and  see  all  these 
dogs  of  war  unleashed.  But  these  dogs  of  war 
were  not  born  the  year  before  last.  They  had 
been  here  all  the  time,  only  they  were  chained 
and  held  in  leash.  Why  were  they  not  kept 
chained  and  in  leash  ?  Why  were  they  allowed 
to  break  loose  and  go  wild  across  the  world  in 
their  havoc  and  devastation  ?  We  know  per- 
fectly well  that  after  a  few  months  they  are  go- 
ing to  be  chained  again,  and  the  great  recon- 
structive processes  will  begin  to  make  the  world 
anew.  But  why  do  these  reconstructive  forces 
have  to  wait?  They  will  not  exist  any  more 
truly  then  than  they  do  to-day.     Why  not  re- 


62  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

lease  them  to-day  to  go  out  and  do  their  creative 
work  in  the  world  now  ?  Why  not  on  Saturday 
let  loose  that  which  is  to  burst  with  creative  free- 
dom on  the  world  on  Easter  morning  ? 

And  1  saw  that  this  was  a  symbol  not  of  his- 
tory only  but  also  of  human  life,  that  every  hu- 
man life  is  just  the  mystery  of  the  infolding  of 
latent  capacities  that  are  there  wrapped  up,  the 
infolding  of  great  ends  of  which  no  man  can 
foretell.  That  is  why,  I  suppose,  a  man  feels 
such  awe  every  time  he  holds  a  very  little  child 
in  his  arms.  He  does  not  know  what  it  is  that 
he  has  in  his  arms,  what  it  is  that  will  some  day 
come  bursting  forth  from  that  little  child.  That 
must  have  been  Mary's  thrill  in  those  early  days 
when  she  held  her  little  one,  knowing  dimly  and 
far  away,  if  not  clearly,  that  she  held  in  her  arms 
the  mighty  Redeemer  of  men.  "  When  I  see  a 
child,"  said  Pasteur,  "  he  inspires  me  with  two 
feelings :  tenderness  for  what  he  is  now,  respect 
for  what  he  may  become  hereafter."  Of  per- 
sonal life  it  is  as  true  as  of  history.  Vast  latent 
possibilities  for  good  may  come  breaking  forth. 
Now  and  then  they  do,  in  some  truth-loving, 
unfearing,  plain-speaking,  God-obeying  Martin 
Luther.  Or  they  may  issue  in  some  tranquil, 
patient,  loving-hearted,  steady-spirited,  immov- 
able Lincoln.  Goodness  comes  leaping  forth, 
and  oftentimes  we  are  tempted  to  think  the  sur- 
roundings, the  circumstances,  produced  it.    They 


MORAL  RESOURCES  63 

produced  none  of  it.  They  gave  it  its  opportu- 
nity and  its  chance,  but  it  was  all  somewhere  all 
the  time  and  it  might  not  have  come  forth  if 
something  inside  had  not  released  the  spring  of 
our  will  to  God's  will  and  let  those  great  energies 
of  good  come  pulsing  out  to  do  their  work. 

And  the  same  thing  is  true  of  the  inwrought 
and  enshrouded  capacities  for  ill.  Jesus  Christ 
laid  off  His  limitations  as  well  as  His  activities 
that  Saturday  in  the  grave ;  and  He  left  His  limi- 
tations there  when  He  came  out.  Out  of  such 
Saturday  graves  in  man's  character  it  may  be 
only  the  limitations  that  emerge.  Out  of  many 
a  man's  life  it  is  the  dog  that  ought  to  be  chained 
that  is  allowed  to  roam  free,  while  all  the  possi- 
bilities for  good  and  sacrifice  and  ministry  are 
still-born  inside.  And  sometimes,  thank  God, 
men  discover  all  this  latent  ill  within  and  lay  on 
it  the  restraining  and  throttling  hand.  As  godly 
old  John  Newton  said  when  one  day  he  saw  a 
criminal  being  led  by,  "  There,  but  for  the  grace 
of  God,  goes  John  Newton."  He  knew  that 
everything  that  had  escaped  in  that  brother  of 
his  lay  latent  in  himself,  and  he  thanked  God 
that  a  hand  had  been  laid  on  all  those  inner  ca- 
pacities for  evil  and  wreckage  and  that  that  hand 
held  them  in  check  and  let  only  the  good  and 
the  true  and  the  pure  go  free. 

There  is  something  infinitely  hopeful  and  en- 
couraging in  the  principle  of  that  Saturday  in 


64  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

our  Lord's  last  week  for  every  man  and  woman 
of  us,  as  we  think  of  life's  work  and  what  we  are 
trying  to  get  done  in  the  world.  So  many  times 
a  thing  seems  all  vain.  The  teacher  tried  to 
breed  in  the  boy  whom  he  taught  a  hate  of  lies 
and  a  love  of  the  truth,  and  he  wrought  with 
tears  and  blood  at  his  task,  and  the  boy  went 
out  from  him  and  it  seemed  to  him  to  have  been 
futile,  this  that  he  had  done  for  him.  We  put 
ourselves  out  in  this  or  that  effort  of  service  in 
the  hope  of  achieving  this  or  that  great  end. 
Every  little  while  it  seems  to  us  to  have  been  all 
fruitless.  But  wait.  It  is  only  Saturday.  Easter 
morning  is  going  to  break  and  the  seed  that  was 
sown  in  the  ground  in  darkness  and  obscurity 
will  come  forth  then.  The  life  that  was  let  go 
for  a  little  while,  all  that  we  did  not  see  and 
therefore  thought  had  run  sheer  to  waste,  we 
shall  discover  then  will  come  pulsating  back. 
"  No  effort  is  wasted,"  said  Pasteur. 

It  is  a  great  joy  of  life  to  believe  this,  that 
what  Isaiah  said  is  true  through  all  the  ages,  by 
the  very  principle  of  the  life  of  God,  that  no 
word  of  His  will  come  back  to  Him  vain  or  be 
void,  that  it  will  accomplish  the  thing  He  pleases 
and  prosper  in  the  errand  whereon  He  sent  it. 
I  received  a  letter  the  other  day  from  a  friend, 
the  Rev.  Adolphus  Pieters,  who  is  a  missionary 
in  Japan.  He  had  for  very  many  years  been  en- 
gaged in  an  interesting  work.      He  published 


MORAL  RESOURCES  66 

advertisements  of  Christianity  in  the  Japanese 
papers,  and  then  occasionally  printed  a  brief  at- 
tractive account  of  what  Christianity  was,  with 
the  hope  of  arousing  the  curiosity  of  Japanese 
readers.  At  the  end  he  would  add  that  if  any 
one  were  interested  he  might  correspond  with 
him.  As  a  result  of  this  work  he  came  into  cor- 
respondence with  hundreds  of  men.  In  this 
recent  letter  he  writes :  *'  The  total  number  of 
people  who  applied  to  us  for  tracts  last  year  was 
959,  making  the  total  from  February,  1914,  when 
the  work  began,  to  December  31,  1915,  3,590. 
There  have  been  seven  baptisms  since  my 
previous  letter,  and  the  total  number  to  date  is 
forty-five.  Number  Forty-Five  is  a  most  in- 
structive case  of  the  Lord's  blessing  resting 
upon  what  was,  humanly  speaking,  a  complete 
failure.  The  young  man  in  question  is  a  bright 
young  student  in  the  Normal  School  at  this 
place,  who  was  baptized  a  week  ago  last  Sun- 
day, after  coming  to  my  house  off  and  on  for 
two  years,  and  getting  a  good  deal  of  instruc- 
tion. I  did  not  reckon  him  among  the  results 
of  the  newspaper  work,  but  after  he  was  bap- 
tized he  told  me  that  he  originally  got  interested 
in  the  Gospel  when  he  was  attending  the  pri- 
mary school  in  his  home  town.  Among  his 
teachers  was  one  named  Okabe  Katsumi,  who 
had  seen  our  advertisements  and  secured  some 
tracts,  among  which  were  copies  of  the  Gospels. 


66  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

He  did  not  care  for  them  himself,  and  had  given 
them  to  this  boy,  who  was  deeply  impressed. 
In  the  course  of  time  the  boy  graduated  from 
school  and  went  to  Gita  to  attend  the  Normal,  and 
he  did  so  with  the  resolution  already  formed  to 
look  up  the  man  who  advertised  in  the  papers  and 
learn  from  him  more  about  the  Christian  religion. 

"  When  I  heard  that,  I  looked  up  the  card  in- 
dex, and  found  among  the  *  dead  '  cards  one  for 
Okabe  Katsumi.  It  was  number  444,  and  he 
had  applied  for  tracts  in  the  spring  of  19 12,  but 
in  August  he  wrote  that  he  had  found  something 
in  our  tracts  that  he  did  not  like,  and  so  had 
made  up  his  mind  to  have  nothing  more  to  do 
with  Christianity.  So  his  card  was  marked  in 
red  ink,  'Closed  August  12,  1913,'  and  filed 
away  among  the  '  dead '  ones — a  complete  fail- 
ure, so  tar  as  any  one  could  see.  But  it  wasn't 
a  failure.  God  knew  better.  Gn  the  fifth  of 
March,  19 16,  a  young  man  made  public  confes- 
sion of  his  faith  and  was  baptized  as  a  sequel  to 
that  application  of  Gkabe  Katsumi  in  19 12. 

"  Such  things  sometimes  make  me  look  with 
something  like  awe  upon  my  card  index.  What 
is  going  on  beneath  the  surface  ?  How  is  God 
working  in  the  hearts  of  the  '  failures,'  or,  if  not 
in  their  hearts,  through  them  in  the  hearts  of 
others  ?  It  is  one  more  proof  that  *  the  founda- 
tion of  God  standeth  sure,  having  this  seal,  The 
Lord  knoweth  them  that  are  his.' " 


MORAL  RESOURCES  67 

Looking  back  across  the  years  it  could  be  seen 
that  bread  sown  upon  the  waters  returned  again. 
Absolutely  no  energy  goes  to  waste  in  this 
world, — no  moral  energy,  no  spiritual  energy, 
any  more  than  physical  energy.  All  that  is  re- 
leased goes  about  its  work.  Let  us  thank  God, 
that  there  that  Saturday  morning  in  the  dark  of 
the  grave  all  that  broke  free  the  next  day  was^ 
and  was  not  dead  beyond  the  resurrection  of  life. 

And  the  assurance  that  a  man  simply  cannot 
do  anything  in  vain  is  not  only  a  word  of  great 
courage  to  us  in  the  work  that  we  are  trying  to 
do  in  the  world,  it  is  a  word  of  hope  and  courage 
to  us  also  in  our  own  personal  life  and  struggle 
for  character.  All  the  energy  we  need  to  ac- 
complish anything  that  ought  to  be  accomplished 
in  us  is  in  our  reach.  "  All  power,"  said  Christ, 
"  is  given  to  me  in  heaven  and  in  earth.  I  stand 
within  at  the  centre  of  your  life.  Draw  on  me. 
Go  out  in  the  faith  of  that  and  do  whatever  your 
work  is  in  the  world.  I  have  the  energy  that 
you  need."  All  the  energy  that  we  require  for 
any  task  in  life  or  out  of  life  is  there,  by  token 
and  assurance  of  the  closed  grave  and  resurrec- 
tion, in  Christ,  waiting  to  be  drawn  upon  by  any 
man  who  wants  to  make  use  of  it. 

And  all  this  is  not  the  exaltation  of  human  will, 
the  setting  up  of  a  man's  own  resolution  and  high 
purpose.  It  is  precisely  the  opposite  of  that,  it 
is  saying  to  a  man :  "  There  do  not  lie  in  the 


68  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

boastful  surface  of  your  life  the  power  and  the 
resources  that  you  need.  Retire  upon  God. 
You  must  get  behind  into  the  unplumbed  depths 
where  Christ  waits.  You  must  go  back  of  the 
Easter  morning  in  the  grave,  the  unopened 
womb  of  the  grave,  to  find  it  there.  All  of  it  is 
there  in  the  now  Risen  Christ  Who  that  Saturday 
morning  awaited  resurrection."  This  is  simply 
making  faith  a  living,  acting  reality  by  which  a 
man  works ;  so  that  he  arises  in  the  morning 
and  can  say :  "  O  God,  I  have  in  Thee  in  me  all 
the  energy  and  strength  that  I  shall  need  this 
day.  No  temptation  can  come  to  me  to-day  that 
I  have  not  got  the  power  in  Thee,  that  I  never 
have  used  yet,  to  draw  upon,  that  will  enable  me 
to  meet  and  conquer.  No  work  will  come  to  me 
to-day  that  is  too  much  for  me,  no  matter  how 
exacting  or  unprecedented  in  my  experience. 
There  is  power  in  Thee  for  me  for  this  work  that 
is  come  to  me  to  do." 

That  Saturday  morning,  more  vividly  than  any 
other  day  that  brings  back  the  triumph  and  pain 
and  glory  of  Easter  to  us,  makes  a  man  assured 
that  all  the  energies  he  needs  are  near  by,  that  in 
God's  own  presence  there  are  all  the  powers  he 
wants,  awaiting  release  by  God's  grace  for  all  the 
necessities  of  his  life.  And  if  we  could  not  be- 
lieve this  about  the  world  we  are  living  in  to-day, 
surely  a  man  could  not  go  on  living  in  it.  If  we 
had  to  surrender  to  the  present  order  and  temper 


MORAL  RESOUKCES  69 

of  the  world  what  would  be  left  to  uphold  us  ?  It 
is  because  we  know  it  is  Saturday  night  in  hu- 
man history  that  we  can  live  through  it. 

We  know  that  as  in  individuals  so  in  all  the 
races  of  mankind,  God  has  planted  these  great 
dormant  energies  and  powers.  For  scores  and 
scores  of  years  the  Chinese  had  despaired  of  their 
power  to  throw  oR  the  opium  curse.  They  knew 
it  was  sapping  the  very  vitality  of  their  land,  and 
yet  they  wondered  whether  the  day  would  ever 
come  when  they  would  have  power  enough  to 
break  those  hateful  chains  that  had  been  forged 
upon  them,  and  get  back  their  freedom.  Twenty 
years  ago,  as  we  went  to  and  fro  in  China,  the 
most  striking  odour  in  the  Chinese  streets  was  the 
pungent  stench  of  smoking  opium.  One  could 
scarcely  go  into  a  Chinese  city  or  walk  in  a  Chi- 
nese highway  without  seeing  the  wretched  ship- 
wrecks who  were  the  products  of  that  vice. 
Poppy  fields  bloomed  red  over  the  Empire,  and 
the  race  had  almost  come  to  despair.  And  what 
do  we  find  to-day?  There  is  scarcely  a  great 
poppy  field  in  the  Republic,  scarcely  a  fume  of 
opium  that  you  can  smell  on  the  public  street 
in  any  Chinese  city.  The  bonfires  flared  across 
the  land  as  they  burned  up  the  signs  of  the  old 
bondage.  A  great  race  arose  in  power  and  in  a 
massive  moral  upheaval  shook  itself  free.  God 
had  planted  the  energies  there  that  needed  only 
the  touch  of  a  living  faith  in  Him,  a  new  assur- 


YO  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

ance  of  the  freedom  of  man  to  do  His  will,  and 
in  this  matter  the  whole  nation  came  out  of  its 
bondage  into  its  liberty. 

For  generations  men  wondered  whether  slaves 
could  ever  be  set  free.  We  almost  feared  in  our 
land  here  that  slavery  was  a  permanent  institu- 
tion. But  there  came  a  time  at  last  when  from 
the  wrist  of  every  American  slave  the  chains  fell 
away.  It  might  have  been  generations  before ; 
it  might  not  have  been  until  generations  after ; 
only  in  that  time  appointed  the  moral  energies 
awoke  and  came  forth,  and  Saturday  burst  into 
Easter  Day  for  the  negro  bondmen  of  America. 

Precisely  the  same  principle  holds  with  regard 
to  the  things  that  we  fight  to-day.  It  holds  with 
regard  to  the  war  on  war.  Some  day  we  shall 
slay  it.  The  kingdom  of  heaven,  said  Jesus,  is 
among  you.  Well,  let  it  loose.  The  kingdom 
of  heaven  will  have  no  war  in  it ;  the  kingdom 
of  heaven  will  have  no  brothers  cutting  one 
another's  throats  in  it ;  the  kingdom  of  heaven 
will  have  in  it  no  vice  and  lust  dragging  its  slimy 
trail  across  men's  hearths  and  hearts.  If  the 
kingdom  of  heaven  is  within,  why  not  set  it  free, 
that  we  may  live  in  it  as  well  as  have  it  buried 
inside  of  us !  The  world  that  we  are  living  in  is 
calling  us  to  go  back  to  that  principle  of  Satur- 
day morning  and  to  believe  that  all  we  need  to 
do  the  will  of  God  is  made  available  for  us  by 
God's  grace  now,  if  we  will  but  obey. 


MORAL  RESOURCES  71 

And  if  some  men  say  that  all  this  is  only  to 
put  in  other  words  the  theory  of  development,  of 
historic  evolution,  why,  what  of  it  ?  Of  course  it 
is,  but  what  is  development  except  the  drawing 
out  of  what  has  been  folded  in  ?  What  is  evolu- 
tion except  the  letting  loose  of  what  the  mind  of 
God  Himself  at  the  beginning  had  planted  with- 
in,— when  in  the  Lamb  slain  from  the  foundation 
of  the  world  He  poured  the  blood  of  Christ  into 
humanity  in  order  that  humanity  might  be  rein- 
forced with  the  adequate  energies  to  enable  it  to 
accomplish  the  thing  that  was  God's  first  dream 
for  it?  Of  course  it  is,  and  that  is  precisely  the 
ground  of  Christ's  constant  appeal.  "Come 
unto  me,"  He  said  to  men,  believing  that  they 
could.  "  Unless  you  hear  My  call  and  follow  Me, 
you  cannot  be  My  disciple."  What  meaning 
was  there  to  His  summons  unless  the  power  to 
respond  was  there  in  answer  to  His  call ?  "I 
stand  at  the  door  of  your  inner  being,"  said  He, 
"  and  knock.     I  am  there  waiting." 

And  so  to  us  to-day,  just  as  clearly  as  in  those 
days,  His  voice  speaks:  "Come  out  of  your 
tomb,  out  of  your  chains,  out  of  your  narrowness, 
out  of  your  limitations,  out  of  your  despairs,  out 
of  your  dejections,  out  of  your  failures, — come 
out  of  them.  The  power  of  the  endless  life  is 
here  for  you,  if  only  by  faith  and  love  you  will 
lay  hold  of  it  to-day."  Is  that  not,  after  all,  the 
great  central  message  and  the  fundamental  prin- 


r2  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

ciple  of  Christ's  Gospel  to  us,  which  He  symbol- 
ized and  illustrated  in  the  shadow  of  the  Satur- 
day before  the  Easter  victory  ?  It  is  in  one  of 
the  old  hymns : 

*'  Low  in  the  grave  He  lay  — 
Jesus,  my  Saviour  ! 
Waiting  the  coming  day  — 
Jesus,  my  Lord  ! 
Death  cannot  keep  his  prey  — 
Jesus,  my  Saviour ! 
He  tore  the  bars  away  — 
Jesus,  my  Lord  ! 
Up  from  the  grave  He  arose. 
With  a  mighty  triumph  o'er  His  foes ; 
He  arose  a  victor  from  the  dark  domain. 
And  He  lives  forever  with  His  saints  to 

reign : 
He  arose  !  He  arose  !  Hallelujah  !  Christ 

arose !  " 

And  He  arose  once  on  Easter  morning  that  on 
the  Saturday  before  and  on  every  day,  every  one 
of  us  might  also  rise  out  of  the  old,  low,  selfish, 
defeated  life  into  the  life  through  which  are  beat- 
ing the  victorious  energies  and  the  sufficient 
strength  of  God.     Shall  it  be  so  with  us  ? 

'*  Rigid  I  lie  in  a  winding  sheet, 

Which  mine  own  hands  did  weave. 
And  my  narrow  cell  is  myself — myself, 
Which  yet  I  may  not  cleave. 

"  And  yet  in  the  dawn  of  the  early  mom, 

A  clear  voice  seems  to  say, 
'  I  am  the  Lord  of  the  final  word. 
And  ye  may  not  say  Me  nay. 


MORAL  RESOURCES  73 

"  *  Unloose  your  hands  that  your  brother's  need 
May  ever  find  them  free. 
Unbind  your  feet  from  their  winding  sheet ; 
Henceforth  they  walk  with  Me.' 

**  And  lo  !   I  hear  !  I  am  blind  no  more  ! 
I  am  no  longer  dumb  ! 
Out  from  the  doom  of  a  self-wrought  tomb, 
Pulsate  with  Ufe,  I  come." 

Yes,  I  may  come  if  I  will,  by  His  life  Who  will 
live  again  in  me. 

But  the  trouble  is  men  do  not  believe  this. 
They  do  not  believe  in  any  latent  capacities 
adequate  to  the  great  task  of  life.  They  accept 
the  principle  of  surrender  and  incompetence. 
They  have  nothing  for  God  and  God  can  make 
no  use  of  them.  And  I  imagine  that  it  is  such 
unbelief,  such  misgiving  as  to  whether  after  all 
we  have  any  possibilities  for  God  in  us,  the 
undervaluation  of  God's  need  of  us  and  power  to 
make  and  use  us,  that  lead  many  of  us  to  live 
the  futile,  unfruitful,  negative  lives  which  we  do 
live.  Men  do  not  think  their  lives  worth  very 
much.  They  do  not  deny  that  there  are  great  men 
and  that  great  work  is  to  be  done  in  the  world,  but 
they  think  that  God  requires  only  those,  that  He 
builds  His  kingdom  on  a  few  outstanding  figures, 
that  the  common  men  can  look  after  themselves, 
and  that  they  are  not  indispensable  to  God.  If  we 
are  to  prevent  this  waste,  and  if  we  are  to  secure 
the  life  without  which   God  is  impotent  to  build 


74  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

His  kingdom  in  the  world,  we  must  somehow 
bring  home  to  men  the  recognition  of  the  great 
truth  that  God  cannot  get  along  without  every 
man  and  all  of  that  man,  and  that  every  human 
life  and  all  its  buried  powers  are  essential  to  God. 
One  of  the  great  purposes  of  our  Lord's  com- 
ing here  to  earth  was  that  He  might  show  men 
the  value  of  a  man's  life  in  the  plan  and  thought 
of  God.  Even  the  most  sacred  and  time- 
honoured  institution  our  Lord  weighed  over 
against  one  man  and  found  him  outweighing 
the  institution.  What  was  His  own  example 
but  the  illustration  of  the  immeasurable  value 
of  man  ?  He  did  not  come  to  teach  the  useless- 
ness  of  human  life,  but  its  pricelessness.  He  did 
this  by  becoming  a  man  Himself.  And  this 
principle  of  God's  need  of  men  and  their  latent 
possibilities  is  not  mere  theological  theory.  It 
is  the  hard  historic  fact  that  God  has  ever  needed 
men  and  waited  for  them  and  for  what  they  were 
the  men  to  do  for  Him.  Look  at  the  great 
inventions,  discoveries,  achievements.  What  is 
the  whole  lesson  of  the  Incarnation  but  that  there 
are  things  that  God  Himself  will  not  do  except 
as  He  uses  man  ?  God  Himself,  we  must  say 
reverently,  was  communicable  and  a  Saviour 
only  as  man.  And  His  call  to-day  as  it  has  been 
all  through  the  years  is  for  men  who  will  believe 
that  the  thing  God  wants  done  can  be  done  by 
Him  through  them.     The  Western  Hemisphere 


MORAL  RESOURCES  Y5 

was  here  before  ever  Columbus  drew  aside  the 
veil  and  broadened  the  horizon  of  mankind. 
These  great  energies  which  drive  the  modern 
world  were  here  from  the  beginning.  We  did 
not  invent  any  of  them.  There  is  not  an  ounce 
of  power  in  the  world  to-day  that  was  not  here 
when  the  world  began.  All  that  man  has  done 
has  been  simply  to  discover  existing  secrets. 
He  has  created  no  power.  He  has  only  found 
out  what  God  has  put  here  for  him  to  find  out. 
It  took  man  a  long  time  to  discover  this.  But 
God  waited  for  him.  And  God  needs  these  find- 
ing men  now  as  much  as  He  has  needed  them  at 
any  time.  He  needs  such  men  now  to  break 
open  what  is  still  concealed.  The  past  has  not 
exhausted  all  the  heroisms,  has  not  accomplished 
all  the  tasks.  There  are  greater  ones  yet  for  the 
days  that  are,  if  God  can  only  find  His  men. 

Think  how  greatly  God  needs  men  to-day  just 
to  bring  need  and  supply  together  in  the  world. 
You  remember  the  incident  in  the  life  of  our 
Lord  as  He  came  by  the  Pool  of  Bethesda  where 
the  sick  lay,  and  spoke  to  one  poor  man  lying  on 
his  pallet. 

"  Are  you  going  in  ?  "  said  He. 

**  No,"  said  the  man.  "  I  have  no  friend  who 
will  help  me  in  and  others  get  the  benefit  before 
I  can  come  near." 

There  was  the  good,  waiting  to  be  gained,  and 
here  was  the  man,  but  he  had  no  man  to  stand 


Y6  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

for  him  between  the  need  and  the  supply.  A 
few  years  ago  a  great  famine  raged  just  back 
from  the  coast  of  China.  There  were  millions  of 
Chinese  families  who  were  in  want  and  hundreds 
of  thousands  died  of  starvation  because  there  was 
not  bread  enough  to  feed  them.  Little  children 
lay  crying  at  the  breasts  of  dead  mothers  by  the 
roadsides.  At  that  very  hour  the  wheat  was 
piled  up  at  railroad  stations  in  Argentina  as  high 
as  church  spires.  There  was  grain  enough  to 
feed  the  starving  millions  in  China.  Here  was 
the  supply  and  there  was  the  need,  but  where 
were  the  men  ?  God  had  not  men  enough  on 
whom  to  float  the  supply  across  to  meet  the 
need.  What  is  true  of  outward  need  is  true  of 
inward  need  as  well.  There  is  never  a  want 
where  there  is  not  an  adequate  supply.  No  little 
child  on  this  earth  need  go  hungry  because  God 
has  not  put  enough  in  this  world  to  feed  it.  No 
human  heart  need  go  starved  because  there  is 
not  enough  love  to  meet  its  wants.  There  is  all 
the  food  and  all  the  love  that  humanity  needs. 
But  there  are  lacking  the  men  who  for  God  will 
bring  the  supply  to  the  demand.  The  human 
need  in  the  world  can  be  met  by  the  supply  only 
through  men  who  will  fill  up  the  gap.  God  can 
do  it  only  as  men  lend  themselves  to  Him.  That 
is  why,  through  all  the  years,  the  call  of  God 
has  been  for  volunteers.  For  every  unique,  ex- 
ternal, individual  call  that  has  been  given  to  men, 


MORAL  RESOURCES  T7 

you  can  find  a  million  calls  that  have  been  just 
the  answer  of  men  to  the  great  call  of  God  for 
volunteers.  And  God  surely  values  the  volun- 
teer above  the  conscript.  Isaiah  did  not  wait 
for  any  special  coercive  call.  "  Also  1  heard  the 
voice  of  the  Lord,  saying,  Whom  shall  I  send, 
and  who  will  go  for  us  ?  Then  said  I,  Here  am 
I ;  send  me."  That  call  was  enough  to  cover 
him,  and  he  answered  it.  There  is  so  much  work 
to  be  done  that  God  cannot  go  marching  through 
the  world  looking  for  individuals,  performing  new 
miracles  by  which  each  individual  is  to  be 
thaumaturgically  led  up  to  his  particular  work. 
God's  general  way  has  been  to  picture  before  the 
eyes  of  His  sons  the  work  to  be  done  and  to 
wait  for  their  hearts  to  leap  in  response,  as 
Isaiah's  leaped  :  "  Lord,  let  me  have  a  share  in 
this  work  '  Here  am  I ;  send  me.'  " 

Men  are  indispensable  to  God  to  put  meaning 
into  the  words  in  which  He  tries  to  tell  His  mes- 
sage to  men.  Words  have  no  meaning  of  their 
own.  Words  mean  only  as  much  as  one  man 
puts  into  them,  or  another  man  takes  out  of 
them.  The  meaning  of  the  word  does  not  come 
from  the  word  ;  it  comes  from  some  life  in  which 
the  word  gets  incarnated,  or  from  some  other  life 
which  interprets  the  word.  What  would  the  word 
"  friend "  signify  to  a  man  who  had  never  had 
one?  What  does  "tenderness"  mean  to  one 
who  has  never  seen  a  mother  and  her  child  ?    Or 


78  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

what  is  "  patriotism  "  to  one  who  has  never  seen 
or  felt  the  contagion  ?  You  remember  what  the 
eunuch  said  when  Phihp  met  him  in  the  chariot 
reading  the  prophet  Esaias.  "  Understandest 
thou  what  thou  read  est  ?  "  Philip  asked.  And  he 
replied,  "  How  can  I,  except  some  man  should 
guide  me  ?  "  Things  mean  nothing  to  men  until 
they  are  shown  to  them.  Men  go  to  China  or 
Japan  and  preach  the  Gospel.  How  is  it  done  ? 
Why,  they  take  words  that  have  old  meanings  and 
fill  them  with  new  and  different  meanings  by  liv- 
ing new  ideas  in  deeds  before  the  people.  In  our 
colleges  this  year  what  meaning  will  honour, 
truth  and  friendship  have,  except  as  these  words 
derive  their  meaning  from  the  object  lessons 
in  some  men's  lives  ?  There  are  places  where 
honour  means  dishonour ;  where  purity  means 
impurity ;  where  truth  means  falsehood.  These 
noble  words  are  confused  with  their  very  oppo- 
sites  because  no  man  has  incarnated  their  right 
meaning  in  his  life.  That  was  one  reason  why 
the  incarnation  was  necessary  nineteen  hundred 
years  ago.  There  was  no  adequate  religious  or 
spiritual  vocabulary  and  never  could  have  been 
otherwise.  If  God  had  not  come  in  the  flesh, 
men  would  not  have  had  the  ideas  that  we  use 
to  describe  God's  coming  in  the  flesh.  To-day, 
as  then,  God  is  dependent  upon  men  in  whom 
He  can  put  meaning  into  His  message  to  the 
world. 


MORAL  RESOURCES  79 

Men  are  indispensable  in  enabling  God  to  get 
His  other  men.  He  gives  men  guidance  for  their 
lives.  But  how  ?  1  appeal  to  your  own  hearts. 
How  do  we  get  the  guidance  of  our  lives  ?  There 
are  many  who  are  sure  of  having  divine  guid- 
ance in  their  lives,  surer  of  that  than  they  are  of 
any  material  thing,  and  yet,  as  we  look  back 
upon  this  supernatural  guidance,  we  realize  that 
it  has  all  been  mediated  through  men.  We  can 
name  man  after  man  who  did  for  our  lives,  in 
smaller  measure,  just  what  that  man  of  Mace- 
donia did  for  Paul.  We  get  our  guidance 
through  men.  Saint  Paul  got  his  through  a 
man.  Through  what  man  was  it  ?  Sir  William 
Ramsay  has  no  doubt  whatever  that  the  man 
whom  Saint  Paul  saw  in  his  dreams  was  none 
other  than  his  friend  Luke.  A  real  man  and  a 
friend,  and  no  ghost  figure,  was  the  man  of 
Macedonia  through  whom  God  gave  Paul  his 
great  missionary  call. 

It  would  be  easy  to  recall  the  lives  of  great 
missionaries  and  point  out  how  they  received 
their  divine  guidance  through  other  men — not 
even  through  a  dream,  far  less  through  some 
miraculous  vision,  but  through  a  brother  man 
who  came  to  talk  with  them,  reasoned  with 
them,  and  showed  them  the  best  way  in  which  a 
man  could  use  his  life.  Men  are  indispensable 
to  God  in  order  to  guide  other  men  into  the 
work  which  God  has  for  them  to  do.     And  one 


80  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

reason  why  there  is  such  an  awful  waste  of  life 
to-day,  why  so  many  men,  going  out  of  the  col- 
leges, miss  the  highest  work  of  their  lives,  is 
simply  because  there  are  not  enough  other  men 
who  recognize  that  they  are  indispensable  to 
God  in  order  that,  through  them,  God  may  guide 
men  to  their  highest  and  most  efBcient  places. 

Men  are  indispensable  to  God  in  bringing 
men  to  Jesus  Christ.  As  men  were  brought  to 
Christ  by  other  men  in  the  beginning,  so  has 
it  been  during  all  the  succeeding  years.  The 
angels  are  willing  to  do  what  they  can,  but  none 
of  us  have  had  any  visible  object  lessons  of  what 
they  do.  Men  have  been  brought  to  Christ 
always  by  other  men.  Imperfect  lives  are  to 
be  brought  up  to  the  Perfect  Life,  and  to  do  this 
service  Christ  uses  common  men,  just  such  as 
we  are.  That  is  what  Paul  conceived  as  the 
glory  of  his  life,  that  he  had  the  privilege  of 
being  the  bond — -no  other  beings  in  the  universe 
being  able  to  take  that  place — between  men  who 
had  not  found  Christ  and  Christ  hunting  for  His 
own. 

Then  God  requires  men  now  as  He  never  re- 
quired them  in  all  the  days  gone  by  to  bear 
testimony  to  the  Deity  of  Jesus  Christ.  We 
know  how  little  value  our  Lord  attached  to  any 
accrediting  evidences  that  did  not  come  right  out 
of  pure,  human  personality.  He  discredited  the 
advantages  of  bringing  back  Abraham  from  the 


MORAL  RESOURCES  81 

dead,  for  example,  to  bear  testimony  to  the  truth. 
If  men  were  not  willing  to  accept  adequate  moral 
evidence,  valid  human  testimony,  they  would  not 
believe  by  miracle.  He  said.  That  is  why  He 
was  so  pleased  with  the  confession  of  Simon 
Peter.  "  Blessed  art  thou,  Simon  Bar-jona  ;  for 
flesh  and  blood  hath  not  revealed  it  unto  thee, 
but  my  Father  which  is  in  heaven."  It  rejoiced 
Him  to  get  such  testimony  from  a  man  who,  in 
turn,  had  drawn  it  out  of  his  own  experience  of 
God.  There  is  no  greater  need  in  the  world  to- 
day than  for  a  great  body  of  men  who  know 
Christ  to  be  God  more  surely  than  they  know 
themselves  to  be  men,  and  are  able  to  go  out 
and  testify  to  what  Christ  can  do  with  a  definite- 
ness  and  certainty  greater  than  that  of  any  other 
testimony  they  can  bear,  who  can  say  what  John 
said,  *'  That  which  we  have  seen  and  heard  de- 
clare we  unto  you."  If  there  ever  was  a  day 
when  God  was  calling  men  to  a  great  under- 
taking, He  is  calling  them  now  to  be  His  wit' 
nesses,  unimpeachable,  unflinching,  to  the  unique 
personality,  to  the  supreme  divine  character  and 
power  of  our  God  and  Saviour  Jesus  Christ. 

And  it  is  not  only  for  great  men  that  God  is 
calling  to  do  these  indispensable  tasks  for  Him. 
He  wants  the  great  men,  no  doubt,  but  He  wants, 
more  than  that,  the  great  mass  of  the  common 
men.  After  all,  the  great  man  is  only  one  man, 
and  every  little  man  counts  just  as  many  as  one 


82  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

great  man.  Since  God  has  to  have  all,  one  little 
man  is  as  indispensable  to  the  all  as  one  great 
man  can  be.  And  until  He  has  all,  He  cannot 
do  what  He  purposes  to  do.  It  is  only  when  we 
all  come  "  unto  the  measure  of  the  stature  of  the 
fullness  of  Christ "  that  any  one  of  us  can  come. 
It  is  only  when  we  *•  comprehend  with  all  saints, 
what  is  the  breadth,  and  length,  and  depth,  and 
height "  of  the  love  of  Christ,  that  any  one  of  us 
can  comprehend  it.  It  is  only  when  we  all  re- 
flect as  in  a  mirror  the  character  of  Christ  that 
any  one  of  us  shall  be  "  changed  .  .  .  from 
glory  to  glory,  even  as  by  the  Spirit  of  the  Lord." 
And  the  little  men,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  are  doing 
as  much  as  the  great.  The  night  that  Gough 
stood  alone,  with  all  hope  gone,  a  drunkard  in 
the  gutter,  an  almost  forgotten  man  laid  his  hand 
on  his  shoulder  and  said,  "  Man,  there  is  a  better 
life  than  this  for  you."  The  name  of  that  man  is 
remembered  by  a  few,  but  forgotten  by  the  mul- 
titudes who  will  never  forget  the  name  of  John  B. 
Gough,  or  cease  to  feel  the  glow  of  the  fires 
which  he  kindled  to  blaze  until  the  Judgment 
Day.  Even  a  little  man  may  fill  such  an  indis- 
pensable place  as  that  of  helping  God  lay  hold 
of  a  great  man  who  will  be  one  of  the  unmistak- 
able forces  of  God. 

And  it  is  not  only  every  man  that  is  indispen- 
sable to  God,  but  also  every  bit  of  every  man. 
We  cannot  take  some  sections  of  our  lives  and 


MORAL  RESOURCES  88 

eliminate  them  as  though  they  were  not  indis- 
pensable to  God.  There  can  be  no  schism  be- 
tween a  man's  public  and  his  private  life.  His 
hands  and  what  he  does  with  them,  his  imagin- 
ings and  where  they  go  when  he  is  alone  by 
himself  without  any  coercing,  these  are  just  as 
much  indispensable  to  God  as  a  man's  public 
worship  or  any  of  his  activities  in  the  open  min- 
istry of  Christ's  kingdom.  It  is  every  bit  of  the 
man — body,  soul,  and  spirit — that  is  indispen- 
sable to  God. 

And  if  we  are  indispensable  to  God,  we  may 
be  very  sure  that  we  are  indispensable  to  the 
world  also.  If  God  needs  us,  the  world  needs 
us  even  more.  It  is  waiting  for  the  rising  up  of 
men  who  know  that  God  needs  them,  and  who 
hand  themselves  over  completely  to  His  uses. 
"The  mightiest  of  civilizing  agencies  are  per- 
sons," said  Dr.  Fairbairn,  "and  the  mightiest 
civilizing  persons  are  Christian  men."  Those 
men  are  doing  most  for  the  world  who  are  do- 
ing most  to  make  men  aware  of  how  necessary 
they  are  to  God,  and  who  are  going  up  and  down 
the  lands  allying  men's  lives  to  the  eternal  life 
and  power  of  God.  This  is  the  greatest  of  all 
works — getting  God  His  men.  I  heard  Dr.  J. 
Campbell  Gibson  tell  the  Chamber  of  Commerce 
in  Glasgow  of  a  visit  which  he  made  to  a  temple 
which  had  been  turned  into  a  modern  school  in 
inland  China.     Over  the  gate  of  the  school  were 


84  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

these  words  in  Chinese  :  "  If  you  are  planting  for 
ten  years,  plant  trees ;  if  you  are  planting  for  a 
hundred  years,  plant  men."  Men  are  God's 
great  interest  and  want. 

What  an  opportunity  this  opens  for  every  man 
of  us  !  We  have  thought  of  our  lives  as  little, 
insignificant,  trivial,  of  no  consequence.  There 
is  One  walking  in  the  midst  of  us  Who  was 
speaking  to  Ezekiel.  "  I  am  hunting  for  a  man," 
He  is  saying,  "  I  am  hunting  for  a  man,"  and  it 
is  open  to  every  one  of  us  to  rise  up  and  say, 
"  Lord,  I  am  that  man  you  are  hunting  for. 
Seek  no  further.  Here  am  I.  Have  me  for 
your  man."  Is  that  the  answer  that  He  is  get- 
ting from  us  ? 


LECTURE  III 
AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE 

IF  we  were  asked  what  we  considered  to  be 
the  supremest  motive  in  Hfe,  the  motive 
which  does  actually  exercise  the  largest  con- 
trol over  human  conduct,  what  would  our  answer 
be?  A  generation  ago  men  would  have  an- 
swered glibly  enough :  "  The  desire  for  happi- 
ness." That  was  then  supposed  to  be  the  one 
commanding  motive  of  mankind.  But  it  was 
not  long  before  the  answer  seemed  unsatisfac- 
tory and  indefinite,  because  what  brings  happi- 
ness to  one  man  brings  misery  to  another,  or 
what  a  man  thinks  will  delight  him  in  the  end 
disappoints  and  such  experiences  issue  in  con- 
fusion. It  was  ethically  indiscriminate  also. 
The  same  motive  covered  moral  contradictions, 
and  men  wanted  some  more  consistent  answer 
to  the  question.  Nowadays  those  who  look  de- 
spondently at  life  often  say  in  reply  :  "  Avarice, 
— the  desire  for  wealth."  Or,  those  who  look  a 
little  more  deeply  say  it  is  not  money,  but  the 
power  that  money  represents  that  men  desire, 
and  that  their  real  motive  is  to  acquire  sources  of 
influence  and  control.  Some  who  look  at  life 
more  hopefully  are  likely  to  reply :    "  Love  or 

85 


86  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

friendship."  That  is  the  thesis  of  one  of  the 
noblest  books  of  our  generation,  written  by  the 
late  Dr.  Henry  Clay  Trumbull,  entitled  "  Friend- 
ship, the  Master  Passion."  Doctor  Trumbull 
told  me  once  that  when  he  first  began  the  work 
on  this  theme  he  spoke  about  it  to  his  friend 
Charles  Dudley  Warner,  who  said  :  "  Trumbull, 
you  cannot  prove  that  thesis."  After  the  book 
was  done,  Doctor  Trumbull  took  the  book  to 
him  and  asked  if  he  would  read  it.  He  read  it, 
gave  it  back,  saying :  "  Well,  Trumbull,  you 
have  shown  that  it  is  true,  after  all."  And  that 
is  a  lovely  view  to  take  of  life :  that  the  motive 
that  lies  deeper  than  any  other,  and  that  really 
in  the  actual  conduct  of  men  and  women  is  the 
most  controlling,  is  the  motive  of  unselfish  friend- 
ship, of  love. 

But  what  would  you  say  if  instead  of  any  one 
of  these  three  or  other  answers  that  may  suggest 
themselves,  some  one  were  to  reply :  "  Not  a  bit 
of  it.  The  motive  that  really  controls  human 
life,  that  does  actually  and  not  theoretically  play 
the  largest  part  in  determining  the  conduct  of 
men  and  women,  \%—fear.^^  And  before  we  pass 
that  contention  by  it  may  be  worth  our  while  to 
look  at  it  and  ask  whether,  or  how  far,  it  is  true. 

Take  it  in  the  matter  of  dress,  for  example. 
Does  not  fear  play  a  large  part  there, — either  the 
fear  of  being  unlike  everybody  else,  or  the  fear 
of    being    too   much   like   everybody  else  ?    In 


AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE  87 

every  land,  more  even  in  civilized  lands  than  in 
uncivilized,  the  element  of  fear  enters  into  the 
small  external  characteristics  of  our  daily  living. 

And  in  the  matter  of  opinion.  We  speak  of 
public  opinion  as  though  it  were  a  free  and  stable 
and  trustworthy  thing.  But  the  public  opinion  of 
one  generation  contradicts  the  public  opinion  of 
another  generation.  The  public  opinion  of  one 
section  of  the  land  denies  the  public  opinion  of 
another  section,  in  the  same  way  in  which  two 
sections  of  society  in  one  community  think  in 
opposite  ways.  Why  ?  Not  because  all  the  in- 
dividuals of  these  particular  generations,  or 
sections,  or  portions  of  the  community  really  and 
independently  have  thought  the  thing  out  for 
themselves,  but  because,  held  under  the  atmos- 
pheric constraint  of  fear,  they  are  unwilling  to 
break  away  from  what  is  determined  for  them  by 
the  opinions  in  the  midst  of  which  they  live. 
There  is  a  good  deal  of  pacifist  opinion  and  a 
great  deal  more  of  militarist  which  is  not  free 
and  personal  at  all,  but  simply  herd  intimida- 
tion. And  a  great  deal  of  race  prejudice  and  inter- 
national suspicion  is  nothing  but  the  miasma 
arising  from  cowardice  or  that  bullying  selfish- 
ness which  is  essentially  cowardly. 

And  a  great  deal  of  religion  is  of  the  same 
character.  The  predominant  element  in  many 
of  the  non-Christian  religions  is  fear.  It  is  so  in 
all   of  the  earlier  or  animistic  religions,  where 


88  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

men  live  in  constant  terror  of  the  spirits  that 
haunt  the  air  or  the  world,  and  where  a  large 
element  of  their  worship  is  shaped  by  that 
dominant  principle  of  their  religion,  the  dread  of 
the  unseen  and  the  unexperienced.  Even  among 
us  is  there  not  a  great  deal,  both  of  religious 
orthodoxy  and  of  religious  heresy,  that  is  only 
the  child  of  fear  ?  There  is  a  coercion  of  sound 
doctrine  and  there  is  a  coercion  of  false  doctrine, 
and  a  great  many  men  and  women  belong  to 
their  school  of  religious  opinion  simply  because 
they  are  afraid  to  break  away  from  the  com- 
panionship in  which  they  have  always  been  or 
to  disagree  with  the  associations  which  condition 
them. 

Much  religious  conduct,  too,  springs  only  from 
the  fear  of  one's  environment.  One  of  the 
saddest  things  which  one  meets  in  going  out 
across  the  world  is  the  great  multitude,  especially 
of  young  men,  who,  when  they  have  left  Chris- 
tian lands  and  the  environment  and  support  of 
Christian  surroundings,  have  simply  collapsed  in 
all  their  religious  conviction  and  character.  Asia 
is  strewn  from  one  end  of  it  to  the  other  with  the 
wrecks  of  men  who,  while  they  were  at  home, 
supposedly  were  men  of  religious  character  and 
conviction,  but  who  showed  when  they  went 
away  from  home  that  it  was  not  a  matter  of  their 
own  real  selves  at  all.  It  was  just  a  matter  of 
their  timid  servility  and  acceptance  of  the  condi- 


AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE  89 

tions  imposed  upon  them  from  without,  so  that 
once  they  were  away  from  home  and  free  to  do 
as  they  pleased  and  had  no  longer  the  help  and 
uplift  of  their  surroundings,  their  environmental 
religion  collapsed  and  they  went  in  an  entirely 
different  way. 

And  I  think  if  only  we  would  go  deep  enough 
in  our  own  lives,  and  be  honest  enough  with  our- 
selves to  gain  a  clear  insight  into  our  motives  and 
impulses,  we  would  discover  how  large  a  part 
fear  has  played  in  us, — fear,  of  course,  in  all  the 
wide  range  of  its  aspects,  that  shades  off  on  the 
one  side  into  arrant  cowardice  and  on  the  other 
side  into  a  mere  hesitancy  of  character  and 
timidity,  but  fear  nevertheless.  Some  of  us  are 
even  now  cloaking  the  things  that  lie  deepest  in 
our  hearts,  because  we  are  afraid  to  give  ex- 
pression to  them.  We  go  into  communities, 
into  circles,  into  conditions  where  what  has  been 
natural  and  real  to  us  is  unnatural  and  abnormal, 
and  we  hide  our  colours  and  conceal  our  prin- 
ciples. And  we  do  things  we  ought  not  to  do 
or  we  do  not  do  the  thing  we  know  we  ought  to 
do  simply  because  of  fear. 

I  had  an  experience  a  little  while  ago  when 
this  diagnosis  was  confirmed  to  me.  In  a  visit  to 
one  of  our  colleges,  among  the  boys  who  came 
around  to  talk  quietly  was  one  whom  I  knew  as 
one  of  the  leading  men  in  the  life  of  the  institu- 
tion.    He  played  on  the  eleven ;  he  was  presi- 


90  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

dent  of  his  class.  He  was  very  timid  about  talk- 
ing lest  somebody  should  overhear,  but  when  as- 
sured that  we  had  the  whole  house  to  ourselves 
he  took  a  letter  out  of  his  pocket  and  handed  it 
to  me. 

He  said :  "  Mr.  Speer,  I  wish  you  would  read 
this." 

I  looked  at  it  and  saw  that  it  was  written  in  a 
girl's  handwriting,  and  said  :  "  No,  tell  me  about 
it." 

"  No,"  he  said,  "  please  read  it.  It  will  tell 
you  a  great  deal  better  than  I  can." 

So  I  opened  his  letter  and  began  to  read,  sub- 
stantially as  follows : 

"  Dear : 


"  I  know  all  about  your  life  at College,  and 

I  want  to  tell  you  what  I  think  about  you.  You  and  I 
have  known  one  another  all  our  lives,  and  we  have  been 
good  friends ;  but  I  think  you  are  a  coward  and  I  think 
that  I  ought  to  tell  you  so." 

I  closed  his  letter  and  handed  it  back  to  him. 
His  lips  were  quivering  and  his  eyes  were  moist 
as  he  said : 

"  You  can  believe  that  when  I  got  that  letter  it 
cut  me  all  up,  and  the  worst  of  it  is  that  what 
she  says  is  true." 

His  father  was  a  minister ;  his  mother  was  of 
the  salt  of  the  earth.  He  had  grown  up  under 
the  best  influences  of  a  clean  and  wholesome 


AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE  91 

Christian  home,  and  he  had  slipped  those  strings. 
He  had  thought  that  it  was  manly  to  surrender  to 
the  current  ideals  of  the  college ;  that  in  cutting 
loose  from  the  influence  of  his  home  he  was  doing 
a  brave  and  courageous  thing.  But  the  girl  knew 
he  was  doing  it  because  he  was  a  coward  and 
she  had  the  courage  to  tell  him  so.  And  he  had 
come  to  see  it  in  that  light  for  himself.  In  his 
college  fraternity  and  in  his  own  class,  men  were 
praising  him  because  he  had  broken  from  the  old 
enslavements  of  home  and  was  living  his  own  life 
like  a  man.  But  he  knew  that  he  was  nothing 
but  a  coward,  who 

"  Held  that  hope  was  all  a  lie 
And  faith  a  form  of  bigotry 

And  love  a  snare  that  caught  him. 
Then  thought  to  comfort  human  tears 
With  sundry  ill-considered  sneers 

At  things  his  mother  taught  him." 

And  he  had  thought  he  was  doing  it  because  he 
was  courageous,  whereas  the  real  motive  was 
that  of  fear.  He  was  a  coward,  without  courage 
enough  to  fly  his  own  flag  unflinchingly,  to  be 
and  do  the  thing  which  in  his  heart,  in  the  very 
fibres  of  his  being,  flesh  of  his  mother's  flesh,  he 
knew  was  the  thing  he  should  be  and  do. 

And  if  we  would  really  look  into  our  live^  we 
should  discover  that  fear  plays  a  far  larger  part 
with  us  than  we  ever  dreamed.  Men  and  women 
lie.     Why  ?    Simply  because  they  are  afraid  of 


93  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

telling"  the  truth  and  taking  the  consequences. 
Nine  out  of  every  ten  falsehoods — perhaps  ninety- 
nine  out  of  every  hundred — are  the  spawn  of 
fear.  And  the  same  thing  is  true  of  sin,  and  of 
no  small  measure  of  unbelief,  as  well  as  of  no 
small  measure  of  pretended  belief. 

Our  great  need  is  the  discovering  of  something 
that  will  cast  fear  out  of  our  lives,  that  will  en- 
able us  to  walk  unafraid  in  the  open  sunlight  of 
His  pathway  Who  bade  men  to  be  afraid  of 
nothing.  Think  how  greatly  we  need  this  eman- 
cipation from  fear  in  the  simple  matter  of  loyalty 
to  principle.  There  is  so  much  of  expediency 
and  compromise  and  adaptation  among  us,  so 
great  reluctance  to  ruffle  the  smooth  convention- 
alities of  life,  whereas  what  the  world  needs  is 
men  and  women  who  can  see  right  principle  as 
principle,  unconfused  and  undistorted,  and  then 
who,  unafraid,  will  abide  in  that  right  principle. 

How  greatly,  too,  this  is  needed  in  the  plain, 
commonplace  matter  of  duty-doing  I  All  around 
us  much  simple  work  waits  to  be  done  by  men 
and  women  who,  first  of  all,  can  see  it,  and  then 
have  the  courage  to  do  it.  The  obscure  tasks 
that,  after  all,  are  the  really  great  and  worthy 
ones,  how  few  there  are  to  do  them  !  There  is  a 
fine  passage  in  Morley's  essay  on  Rousseau  in 
which  he  describes  what  real  history  is,  and  how 
much  we  make  of  history  that  really  is  not  his- 
tory at  all,  but  simply  the  spectacular  doings  of 


AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE  93 

men  who  for  the  time  being  were  deemed  great 
and  who  usually  were  engaged  in  war,  whereas 
the  great  bulk  of  Hfe  was  not  the  life  of  warfare 
at  all.  It  was  the  life  of  peace, — of  the  quiet 
agricultural  people,  of  the  tradespeople,  of  the 
homes,  which  is  not  written  up  in  any  history  at 
all, — that  was  the  real  history  of  the  world.  The 
men  and  the  women  who  were  doing  earth's  work 
were  not  those  who  went  out  to  battle  or  on  great 
expeditions,  but  those  who,  day  by  day,  heroic- 
ally, unflinchingly,  and  without  fear  of  oblivion, 
did  the  real  business  of  the  world.  There  are 
some  familiar  lines  of  Lowell's  in  "  Under  the 
Old  Elm  "  that  put  the  principle  for  us : 

**  The  longer  on  this  earth  we  live 

And  weigh  the  various  qualities  of  men, 

Seeing  how  most  are  fugitive, 

Or  fitful  gifts,  at  best,  of  now  and  then. 

Wind-wavered,  corpse-lights,  daughters  of  the  fen, 

The  more  we  feel  the  high  stern -featured  beauty 

Of  plain  devotedness  to  duty,  steadfast  and  still. 

Not  fed  with  mortal  praise, 

But  finding  amplest  recompense 

For  life's  ungarlanded  expense 

In  work  done  squarely  and  unwasted  days." 

And  take  this  matter  of  Christian  service  that 
lies  before  the  thought  of  every  earnest  young 
life.  Why  are  so  many  of  us  going  to  be,  in  the 
cities  and  homes  from  which  we  came,  the  same 
useless  driftwood  that  we  have  been?  Why? 
Simply  because  of  our  want  of  courage  to  face 


94  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

the  work  that  needs  to  be  done  there,  and  to  un- 
dertake that  work  without  fear  that  we  cannot  do 
it,  without  fear  that  God  will  desert  us  in  attempt- 
ing to  do  it,  without  fear  of  the  irregularity  and 
uniqueness  of  our  being  seen  engaged  in  it. 
Throughout  the  world  Christ  waits  for  men  and 
women  to-day,  as  He  waited  for  them — and  so 
often  in  vain — while  He  was  here  on  earth. 
Who  will  hear  His  call  now  ?  "  Lay  aside  your 
fear  and  trust  Me  to  be  with  you  and  to  enable 
you  to  do  the  thing.  Come  and  take  up  My  task 
after  Me." 

Some  of  us  would  dread  to  go  out  to  live 
among  the  Chinese  or  Mohammedan  peoples,  so 
far  away.  But  we  would  not  dread  going  out  to 
live  in  the  legation,  nor  would  we  dread  it  much 
if  we  were  to  be  employed  in  some  great  com- 
mercial enterprise.  Yet  the  geography  would 
be  precisely  the  same,  and  our  dangers  and 
friendlessness  would  be  far  greater.  But  we  would 
not  fear  all  that,  because  others  would  think  it 
natural  and  appropriate  for  us.  But  this  other 
thing — the  missionary  call — would  be  so  excep- 
tional, so  unusual,  so  fantastic,  even  fanatical, 
that  we  would  fear  to  do  any  such  dreadful  thing  1 
But  which  life  of  us  is  worth  mentioning  in  the 
same  breath  with  the  life  of  God's  Son  Who  came 
into  a  carpenter's  home  in  a  wretched  little  Jew- 
ish village  amid  an  outcast  race,  in  a  bare  re- 
mote corner  of  the  earth,  and  lived  there  among 


AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE  95 

peasant  folk  and  farmers,  pent  up  in  the  chamel 
house  of  humanity,  and  Who  was  willing  to  count 
His  equality  with  God  not  a  prize  jealously  to  be 
retained,  Who  emptied  Himself  and  took  on  Him 
the  form  of  a  servant  and  became  obedient  unto 
death,  even  the  death  of  the  Cross  ?  The  con- 
trast between  our  life,  with  all  its  privileges,  to- 
day and  the  most  squalid  African  village  is  in- 
visible over  against  the  contrast  between  what 
Christ  laid  down  and  what  Christ  took  up  for  the 
love  He  bore  us  and  His  world. 

And  we  need  greatly  this  fearlessness  in  our 
confession  of  Him, — that,  without  concealing 
Whom  we  follow  and  Whose  servants  we  are,  we 
should  go  out  now,  openly  to  avow  our  disciple- 
ship  and  the  vow  we  have  taken  of  loyalty  to 
our  Lord  Jesus  Christ  1  Think  how  many  be- 
trayals of  Him  there  have  been,  and  how  much 
of  putting  afresh  to  shame  the  Son  of  God  and 
crucifying  Him  anew  by  men  and  women  who 
had  said  they  were  going  to  follow  Him  faith- 
fully, just  as  Simon  said  he  was  resolved  to  do 
on  that  very  night  in  which  before  the  cock  crew 
he  denied  his  Lord.  Shall  we  not  go  out  into  the 
coming  days  with  something  in  us  that  casts  out 
this  fear? 

We  look  with  longing  and  admiration  upon 
such  deliverance  from  fear  when  we  find  it  in 
other  lives.  I  was  in  Edinburgh  during  the 
South  African  war,  just  after  the  battle  of  Mae- 


96  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

gersfontein,  and  was  staying  in  the  house  of 
friends.  There  was  one  little  boy  in  the  family 
named  after  Prof.  Henry  Drummond.  I  had 
been  in  the  library  all  the  afternoon,  the  very 
room  in  which  Sir  James  Simpson  discovered 
chloroform,  and  then  had  gone  into  the  drawing- 
room  for  afternoon  tea.  The  boy  and  his  gov- 
erness were  the  only  other  members  of  the  house- 
hold who  came  down.  He  and  I  fell  to  talking 
about  the  war.  I  asked  him :  *'  What  do  you 
think  about  the  war  in  South  Africa  ?  " 

"  Well,"  he  said,  "  I  did  not  think  much  about 
it  at  the  beginning  ;  I  did  not  think  about  it  much 
until  a  friend  of  mine  was  killed." 

"Yes,"  I  said,  "  who  was  the  friend  ?" 

"  General  Wauchope." 

He  was,  as  you  know,  the  commander  of  the 
Black  Watch,  and  the  Black  Watch  had  been 
recruited  from  Edinburgh.  The  boy  told  rne 
about  the  regiment  and  its  fate,  and  shortly  after 
his  story  was  filled  up  by  an  Oxford  man  who 
had  been  in  Edinburgh  when  the  tidings  of  the 
battle  came.  He  said  every  shop  was  closed, 
and  along  the  streets  little  knots  of  men  were 
gathered,  and  you  could  see  the  sobbing  of 
strong  men  everywhere.  There  was  scarcely  a 
great  family  in  Edinburgh  that  had  not  been 
touched.  And  yet,  at  the  same  time,  all  through 
the  city  there  was  a  subdued  sense  of  moral 
elevation,  as  though  something  had  lifted  the 


AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE  9l 

character  and  temper  of  the  city.  They  sor- 
rowed in  what  had  gone  out  from  them ;  but 
they  rejoiced  in  the  way  that  it  had  gone.  That 
regiment  had  been  organized  as  a  Scotch  kirk. 
The  chaplain  was  the  minister  of  the  kirk.  The 
officers  constituted  the  kirk's  session.  I  believe 
almost  every  man  in  the  regiment  was  a  member 
of  the  kirk,  and  I  was  told  that  as  they  went 
down  through  the  streets  of  Cork  to  embark  for 
South  Africa,  although  not  under  orders  or  re- 
'  straint,  the  men  walked  with  arms  on  one  an- 
other's shoulders,  singing : 

"  I'm  not  ashamed  to  own  my  Lord, 
Or  to  defend  His  cause. 
Maintain  the  honour  of  His  Word, 
The  glory  of  His  laws." 

And  when  they  were  disembarked  at  Cape 
Town  and  were  taking  their  train  to  go  to  the 
front,  they  went  on  board  singing  the  old  Gospel 
soldier's  hymn : 

"  When  the  roll  is  called  up  yonder, 
I'll  be  there." 

They  were  sent  right  up  and  almost  at  once 
into  that  fateful  battle.  General  Wauchope  knew 
somebody  had  blundered,  and  he  said  to  the 
men :  "  Men,  do  not  blame  me  for  this."  And 
without  any  fear  they  went  into  the  ending 
from  which  no  soldier  such  as  they  would  draw 
back,  unafraid  of  anything  that  might  come  to 


08  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

them  because  unashamed  to  own  their  Lord  and 
unfearing  to  follow  Him. 

Of  such  as  those  are  we  to  be  ?  Or  will 
temptation  intimidate  us,  and  the  tone  of  the 
conversation  of  the  men  and  women  with  whom 
we  mingle  pull  us  down  and  cause  us  to  fold  our 
colours  up  and  lay  them  away,  as  the  man  did 
whom  the  sneer  of  a  serving  maid  caused  to 
deny  the  Lord  Who  was  dying  for  him  ? 

Where  are  we  to  find  that  which  will  drive  out 
this  fear?  **  Perfect  love  casteth  out  fear.  .  .  . 
He  that  feareth  is  not  made  perfect  in  love." 
From  how  many  of  our  hearts  to-day  will  the 
perfect  love  of  Him  Whom  we  call  Master  and 
Lord  expel  all  fear?  Let  it  be  so  now.  Not 
years  afterwards,  when  other  things  shall  have 
palled  upon  us,  years  that  shall  have  brought 
their  dulling  influence  with  them,  but  now,  in  all 
the  full  strength  and  richness  and  glory  and 
eagerness  of  our  lives,  let  us  admit  the  perfect 
love  that  shall  cast  out  fear  and  send  us  out  the 
kind  of  men  and  women  Christ  would  have  us 
be,  to  join  the  great  company  of  men  and  women 
and  girls  and  boys  who,  unfearing, 

<'....    climbed  the  steep  ascent  of  Heaven, 
Through  peril,  toil  and  pain. 
O  God,  to  us  may  grace  be  given 
To  follow  in  their  train  !  " 

Christian  character  needs  this  conquest  of  fear 
and  it  needs  the  love  which  is  one  of  the  deep 


AN  UNFKIGHTENED  HOPE  99 

springs  of  such  conquest.  It  needs  also  in  our 
day  an  immensely  more  practical  use  of  the 
principle  of  hope,  a  principle  almost  totally 
neglected  in  theology  and  made  nothing  of  in 
our  codes  of  conduct  or  in  our  creeds.  Paul  had 
a  far  deeper  insight  into  the  human  heart  and  a 
vasdy  richer  grasp  on  life.  "Now  abideth  faith, 
hope,  love,  these  three,"  said  he. 

Paul  rendered  a  large  service  when  he  con- 
densed the  central  ideals  and  principles  of  Chris- 
tianity in  this  way.  The  human  mind  is  very 
fond  of  formulas.  If  it  had  not  been  for  some 
authoritative,  simplifying  word  like  this,  we 
might  have  gone  on  to  construct  all  sorts  of 
prescriptions  like  the  threes  and  sixes  and  tens 
and  fifteens  with  which  we  are  so  familiar  in 
Buddhism.  And  yet  the  service  which  Paul 
rendered  is  not  without  its  dangers,  for  men  are 
prone  to  simplify  further  and  to  see  whether  the 
three  cannot  be  reduced  to  one,  or  to  arrange 
the  order  and  proportions  of  the  three,  or  to  con- 
tend alone  for  that  which  some  one  of  them 
signifies  at  the  expense  of  the  other  two.  Paul's 
own  words  should  have  saved  us  from  such  folly, 
for  he  said  quite  clearly  that  one  of  these  three 
was  the  greatest,  "  And  now  abideth  faith,  hope, 
love,  these  three ;  and  the  greatest  of  these  is 
love."  And  yet  his  own  doctrine  elsewhere  has 
been  used  to  correct  and  to  counteract  his  ex- 
pressed judgment  here,  and  through  the  years 


100  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

we  have  had  our  theologies  constructed  in  dis- 
regard of  the  domination  of  that  one  of  these 
three  principles  which  Saint  Paul  exalts.  It  has 
been  in  terms  of  faith,  and  faith  given  a  very- 
definitive  construction,  that  our  theological 
thinking  with  regard  to  Christianity  has  been 
chiefly  done.  Little  by  little  however  the  pro- 
portions have  changed,  and  now  love,  as  one  of 
the  three  great  fundamental  principles  of  Chris- 
tianity, is  coming  to  its  own,  not  as  a  principle 
of  action  only  but  as  a  regulative  principle  also 
of  our  thought. 

But  it  is  a  strange  thing  that  no  one  has  ever 
arisen,  apparently,  to  say  of  hope  what  the  intel- 
lect of  the  Church,  over  against  Paul's  judgment, 
has  been  prepared  to  say  of  faith.  He  declared 
that  of  these  three,  love  is  the  greatest.  The 
current  opinion  of  Christian  thought  through  the 
Christian  centuries  has  contended  that  faith  was 
the  greatest.  What  would  men  say  if  some  one 
should  arise  now  to  restore  the  proportions,  who 
would  make  bold  to  declare,  *'  Now  abideth  faith, 
hope,  and  love ;  and  the  greatest  of  these  is 
hope"?  Surely  the  day  will  come  some  time 
when  hope  will  come  to  its  own,  when  the 
Christian  heart  and  mind  will  no  longer  be  con- 
tent to  construe  its  interpretation  of  Christianity 
in  terms  either  of  love  or  of  faith,  or  of  love  and 
faith  together,  but  will  insist  that  these  three 
abide — faith  and  love  and  hope. 


AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE  101 

And  when  a  man  stops  for  a  moment  to  think, 
to  disengage  himself  from  the  unscrutinized  con- 
ventions, he  begins  to  realize  immediately  that 
he  has  no  faith  and  love  unless  he  makes  larger 
room  for  hope  in  his  thinking  and  feeling  than 
has  been  allowed  to  us.  For  there  cannot  be 
any  faith  detached  from  hope.  You  can  con- 
ceive of  faith  in  three  different  ways.  You  may 
think  of  it  in  its  primary  form,  in  its  primary 
form  in  the  New  Testament  at  least,  as  personal 
trust,  as  the  confidence  that  exists  between  two 
personal  spirits.  But  even  so,  can  you  think  of 
it  without  hope?  If  I  have  no  hope  of  seeing 
Him  in  Whom  I  trust,  of  consulting  with  Him,  or 
serving  Him,  of  entering  into  a  deeper  and  en- 
larged fellowship  with  Him,  will  not  my  personal 
trust  soon  empty  itself  of  reality  ?  Or,  secondly, 
you  may  think  of  faith  as  the  writer  of  the  Epistle 
to  the  Hebrews  does,  as  the  "  substance  of  things 
hoped  for  "  ;  in  which  without  any  flinching,  he 
binds  faith  up  with  hope  in  terms  that  cannot  be 
severed.  And,  thirdly,  if  you  go  on  to  the  rest 
of  his  definition,  "  the  substance  of  things  hoped 
for,  the  evidence  of  things  not  seen,"  still  faith  is 
undetachable  from  hope ;  for,  as  Paul  says  in 
another  passage,  "  We  are  saved  by  hope :  but 
hope  that  is  seen  is  not  hope :  for  what  a  man 
seeth,  why  doth  he  yet  hope  for?  But  if  we  hope 
for  that  we  see  not,  then  do  we  with  patience 
wait  for  it."     And  you  cannot  detach  love  from 


102  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

hope  or  have  anything  that  is  real  in  the  expe- 
rience of  love  unless  it  inevitably  leads  a  man  on 
into  those  things  that  clearly  were  in  Paul's  mind 
when  he  spoke  not  of  faith  and  love  only  but 
also  of  hope.  I  ask  any  man's  heart  if  it  is  pos- 
sible to  divorce  hope  from  love.  I  suppose  in 
one  sense  it  may  be,  and  that  you  can  speak  of 
a  hopeless  love.  Henry  Martyn's  heroic  and 
tragic  life  was  the  unfolding  of  a  hopeless  love. 
But  how  different  that  is  from  love  that  is  under- 
shot with  hope.  One  looks  towards  evening  to 
see  the  children  waiting  as  he  comes  home.  The 
workman  lives  in  the  hope  of  all  that  is  there  of 
joy  and  confidence  and  perfect  trust  inside  his 
home.  Love  would  be  a  sorry  thing  to-day  if  it 
were  stripped  of  the  hopes  that  give  it  its  sweet- 
ness and  its  joy. 

And  it  is  not  only  faith  and  love  that  root 
themselves  inseparably  in  hope,  and  that  lose 
their  fragrance  and  meaning  if  they  do  not  con- 
tinue to  draw  both  out  of  hope,  but  regarding 
almost  everything  else  that  is  dearest  and  most 
precious  to  us  in  life,  does  it  not  spring  from  this 
same  great  treasury  ?  In  one  of  the  chapters  of 
the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  we  find  Paul  again 
and  again,  in  his  efforts  to  bring  his  message  out 
to  those  to  whom  he  writes,  describing  God  in 
different  terms  of  speech.  He  begins  by  speak- 
ing of  Him  as  the  God  of  comfort,  the  God  of 
patience,  and  then  he  goes  on  to  speak  of  Him 


AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE  103 

as  the  God  of  hope.  "  Now  the  God  of  hope  fill 
you  with  all  joy  and  peace  in  believing,  that  ye 
may  abound  in  hope."  And  then  he  closes  by 
speaking  of  the  God  of  peace  who  is  to  order  all 
hearts.  Quite  evidently  in  his  thought  these 
things  all  run  together,  as  again  he  writes :  "  Be 
ye  sober.  Walk  as  children  of  light.  Put  on 
the  breastplate  of  faith  and  love,  and  for  an 
helmet  the  hope  of  salvation."  Joy  and  glad- 
ness and  confidence  and  trust  and  hope,— all  are 
rooted  each  in  the  other  in  his  own  mind  and 
experience.  The  best  that  we  have  got  in  life 
springs  from  the  fountains  of  hope. 

We  do  not  wonder,  accordingly,  that  the  old 
religious  experience  and  the  richer  Christian  ex- 
perience, when  it  came,  conceived  and  spoke  of 
God  as  the  God  of  love  and  the  God  of  hope. 
They  never  spoke  of  Him  as  the  God  of  faith. 
The  old  Hebrew  idea  of  Him  was  as  the  ground- 
rock  of  their  hope.  "O  hope  of  Israel,"  was 
their  cry.  The  lovely  thing  is  that  that  burst 
from  the  lips  of  the  man  who  mourned  for  his 
nation  :  "  O  the  hope  of  Israel,  the  saviour  thereof 
in  time  of  trouble."  "  Hope  thou  in  God  :  for  I 
shall  yet  praise  him,  who  is  the  health  of  my 
countenance,  and  my  God."  God  Himself  when 
He  comes  to  let  Himself  be  richly  known  to  men 
makes  on  them  the  impression  of  a  great  and 
joyous  and  glad  and  eager  and  boundless  hope. 
And  when  we  turn  away  from  such  clews  as 


104  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

these  and  look  right  into  the  face  of  life  to  ask 
what  the  powers  and  services  and  functionings 
of  hope  in  the  actual  life  of  man  and  in  the  life 
of  the  world  are,  we  realize  that  all  this  exultant 
hope  has  its  deep  grounding  in  the  actual  living 
needs  of  men.  It  is  by  hope — the  New  Testa- 
ment is  unequivocal  about  it,  and  our  own  expe- 
rience answers  to  that  word — it  is  by  hope  that 
we  are  saved.  Not  in  one  passage  in  the  New 
Testament  can  you  find  the  declaration  that  we 
are  saved  by  faith.  We  are  saved  "  by  grace 
through  faith,"  but  Paul  is  flat-footed  in  his  dec- 
laration that  we  are  saved  by  hope.  And  the 
moment  a  man  looks  life  square  in  the  face  he 
sees  why  it  should  be  so.  Were  it  not  for  hope 
there  could  not  be  any  saving  that  were  worth  a 
man's  while.  There  might  be  a  clearing  up  of 
the  past ;  we  might  secure  something  like  a  clean 
conscience ;  but  there  could  not  be  any  confi- 
dence, any  ease,  any  rest,  as  over  against  the 
tragic  problem  of  life,  if  a  man  could  not  look 
out  into  the  future — which  is  really  the  thing  he 
now  has  to  deal  with — with  boundless  hope. 
Salvation  is  just  that  thing.  It  is  not  cleaning 
up  our  lives  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  past, 
just  for  the  sake  of  cleaning  up  our  lives  ;  but  it 
is  the  hope  that  for  the  sake  of  our  future  God 
is  going  to  live  in  us  a  saving  life. 

All  this  is  true  whether  we  think  of  salvation 
as  it  comes  penetrating  our  lives  and  dealing 


AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE  105 

with  such  problems  as  in  shame  and  self-distrust 
we  think  of  in  our  hours  of  recollection  and  peni- 
tence, or   whether  we  think  of  it  as  something 
reaching  out  into  the  expanding  experience  of 
the  future.     Either  way,  salvation  is  a  matter  of 
hope.     There  is  a  lovely  touch  in  one  of  Paul's 
epistles  where  he  says :  "  Having  therefore  these 
promises,  dearly  beloved,  let  us  cleanse  ourselves 
from  all  filthiness  of  the  flesh  and  spirit,  perfect- 
ing holiness  in  the  fear  of  God."     What  do  you 
think  of  that  motive  ?     He  does  not  say,  "  See- 
ing that  our  sin  is  so  black  and  abhorrent  as  it 
is,  seeing  that  the  past  is  so  shameful  and  un- 
worthy as  it  is,  let  us  cleanse  ourselves."     "  My 
brothers,"  he  said,  "  seeing  we  have  such  prom- 
ises "—that  is,  "  that  the  hope  is  so  bright,  that 
there  is  no  ground  for  despair,  that  we  can  be- 
lieve  victory   can  actually  be  achieved  by  us, 
seeing  that  we  have  these  hopes,  let  us  cleanse 
ourselves  in  growing  holiness." 

And  then  when  those  first  Christian  men  came 
to  look  not  only  at  this  present  purging  of  life 
which  should  leave  it  rich  and  fragrant  and 
glorious  but  out  upon  the  wide  ranges  of  the  un- 
tried and  the  unforeseeable,  they  still  construed 
salvation  in  terms  of  hope.  "  Now  are  we  the 
sons  of  God,  and  it  doth  not  yet  appear  what  we 
shall  be :  but  we  know  that,  when  he  shall  ap- 
pear, we  shall  be  like  him  ;  for  we  shall  see  him 
as  he  is.     And  he  that  hath  this  hope  in  him 


106  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

purifieth  himself,  even  as  he  is  pure."  It  is  so 
because  there  is  in  front  of  us  the  dear  voice 
calling,  the  voice  that  says  to  every  one  of  us : 
"  Man,  let  that  old  past  go  now.  It  is  done  and 
gone  beyond  recall.  Come  out  with  Me.  There 
is  a  new  road  for  your  feet  and  Mine,  a  new  tale 
that  is  to  be  unfolded  now,  a  new  story,  the  con- 
tradiction of  the  old.  Let  the  past  go  now,  and 
come  and  walk  with  Me  in  the  limitless  hope  of 
the  new  ways." 

And  it  is  not  only  by  hope,  as  a  simple  down- 
right matter  of  fact,  that  men  are  saved  and  held 
fast  to  the  Saviour ;  it  is  by  hope  also  that  men 
are  nerved  and  empowered.  In  the  hour  of 
darkness,  it  is  what  lights  all  the  darkness  and 
makes  it  possible  for  men  to  bear.  "Yes,"  we 
say  to  ourselves  in  the  hour  of  pain,  "  I  know ; 
but  I  can  stand  it,  for  after  this  comes  something 
that  is  different  from  this."  That  is  what  the 
honest  doctor  says  to  us  when  he  deals  with  us. 
"  Now  hold  steady  for  a  moment.  I  am  going 
to  cut  and  it  will  hurt  dreadfully.  But  just  wait. 
Beyond  the  pain  lies  freedom  from  pain."  And 
we  say,  "Yes,  doctor,  cut.  I  can  stand  it."  In 
a  moment  the  anguish  is  over.  We  endure  in 
that  hope.  Has  it  not  always  been  so  ?  For  a 
little  while  the  mother  bears  her  anguish  and  her 
pain  for  the  joy  and  hope  that  a  child  is  born 
into  the  world.  For  a  little  while  Jesus  bore  the 
loneliness  and  the  anguish  of  His  grief  and  the 


AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE  107 

shadow  and  the  pain  and  the  disgrace  of  His 
Cross,  because,  looking  over  it,  He  saw  the  glory 
that  awaited  Him  and  the  world,  and  He  en- 
dured all  this,  this  anguish  of  the  Cross,  for  the 
joy  that  was  set  beyond.  "  Therefore,"  says 
Paul,  "  we  rejoice  in  tribulation,  in  being  flailed, 
in  being  pressed  down  as  grapes  in  the  wine- 
press, in  being  put  through  discipline  and  strain, 
we  rejoice  in  all  that,  because  we  know  that 
tribulation  worketh  steadfastness,  steadfastness 
experience,  and  experience  hope,  and  hope 
maketh  not  ashamed." 

And  you  know  the  paradox,  and  the  glory  of 
it,  is  that  the  darker  you  make  the  shadows  the 
more  triumphantly  hope  laughs  in  the  midst  of 
them.  The  more  difficult  you  make  the  night, 
the  more  hopeful  and  enticing  is  the  sure  confi- 
dence of  the  dawn  that  is  not  far  away.  Our 
word,  "  Cheer  up !  The  worst  is  yet  to  come," 
is  as  deep  a  Christian  word  as  was  ever  yet 
spoken.  Be  glad,  because  darker  things  lie  just 
ahead  and  then  light  beyond.  Thank  God  that 
you  are  counted  worthy  for  tribulations  like 
these  ;  for  these  are  what  wash  white  a  man's 
robes  and  make  him  fit  to  walk  after  the  Lamb 
whithersoever  He  goes,  in  company  with  the 
men  whose  lips  have  never  known  a  lie. 

All  this  is  put  finely  for  us  in  "  The  Ballad  of 
the  White  Horse,"  the  best  piece  of  work  Ches- 
terton has  done.     They   were  as  dark  days  as 


108  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

ever  had  been  in  English  history.  Tide  after 
tide  of  invasion  from  Norse  and  Dane  had  come 
pouring  in.  Again  and  again  Alfred  had  called 
his  men  and  gone  out  and  fought,  and  each 
time  in  vain.  Now,  as  he  sits  on  his  little  island 
in  the  Thames  among  the  reeds,  the  news  comes 
to  him  that  the  Danes  are  on  their  way  for  a 
fresh  invasion  of  his  land.  He  kneels  in  prayer 
and  asks  the  Virgin  Mother  whether  he  ought  to 
go  out  yet  once  more.  Again  and  again,  he 
tells  her,  he  has  gone  out  in  hope,  and  each  time 
in  the  confidence  that  victory  would  be  his,  and 
each  time  he  has  come  back  defeated,  his  men 
killed,  and  his  people  to  sink  lower  after 
each  despair  than  the  time  before.  And  yet, 
as  he  prays  to  her  he  says  that  if  she  wull  give 
him  one  word  of  assurance,  he  will  go  again. 
But  only  this,  as  she  stands  by  his  side,  will  she 
say, 

*'  I  tell  you  naught  for  your  comfort. 
Yea,  naught  for  your  desire, 
Save  that  the  sky  grows  darker  yet, 
And  the  sea  rises  higher." 

And  there  that  day  among  the  reeds  under  the 
promise  only  that  the  night  was  going  to  be 
blacker  than  he  had  ever  known,  that  storms 
fiercer  than  he  had  ever  breasted  were  coming, 
Alfred  rises  up  to  do  what  he  had  never  done 
under  the  old  assurance  of  easy  victory. 


AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE  109 

*•  Up  over  windy  wastes  and  up 
Went  Alfred  over  the  shaws, 
Shaken  of  the  joy  of  giants, 
The  joy  without  a  cause." 

And  as  his  men  saw  him  coming,  they  thought 
it  was  with  the  old  vain  word  of  a  sure  victory, 
and  they  were  about  to  tell  him  in  advance  that 
if  he  came  with  such  a  message  they  would  fol- 
low him  no  more.  But  not  now  was  Alfred's 
word  the  easy  word.     No,  but — 

"  This  is  the  word  of  Mary, 

The  word  of  the  world's  desire ; 
'  No  more  of  comfort  shall  you  get 
Save  that  the  sky  grows  darker  yet, 
And  the  sea  rises  higher.'  " 

And  in  front  of  that  darkening  sky  and  that  ris- 
ing sea  his  men  rose  up  to  go  with  him,  and  this 
time,  from  the  darkest  night  they  had  ever  known, 
came  the  bright  morning  of  their  lasting  victory. 
Thank  God,  we  are  not  called  out  on  any  soft 
errand  under  the  incitement  of  bright  choices, 
but  challenged  by  great  difficulties,  black  nights 
and  rising  storms,  to  work  in  the  hope  of  that 
which  is  invisible  and  which  lies  beyond.  It  is 
by  hope,  and  hope  that  lies  behind  impenetrable 
clouds,  that  men  are  nerved  and  empowered.  It 
is  because  the  world  is  so  black  and  dark  to-day 
that  we  walk  out  into  it  smiling  in  its  face,  know- 
ing that  behind  all  this  the  morning  the  more 


110  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

surely  waits,  the  morning  in  which  the  men  be- 
lieve who  have  faith  and  love  and  hope. 

And  it  is  by  hope  that  our  comforts  are  drawn 
down  into  our  lives  when  the  darkest  of  all 
days  come,  and  everything  is  quiet  about  the 
house  and  the  litde  feet  that  had  run  to  and  fro 
are  still.  We  say,  "  Yes,  a  litde  while  and  then 
those  angel  faces  will  smile,  that  I  have  loved 
and  lost  and  love."  What  would  we  do  in  those 
hours  if  it  were  not  for  the  sure  hope  ?  Saint 
Paul  lays  his  own  heart  open  to  all  his  friends  in 
one  of  his  episdes :  "  But  I  would  not  have  you 
to  be  ignorant,  brethren,  concerning  them  which 
are  asleep,  that  ye  sorrow  not,  even  as  others 
which  have  no  hope.  For  if  we  believe  that 
Jesus  died  and  rose  again,  even  so  them  also 
which  sleep  in  Jesus  will  God  bring  with  him. 
For  this  we  say  unto  you  by  the  word  of  the 
Lord,  that  we  which  are  alive  and  remain  unto 
the  coming  of  the  Lord  shall  not  prevent  them 
which  are  asleep.  For  the  Lord  himself  shall 
descend  from  heaven  with  a  shout,  with  the  voice 
of  the  archangel,  and  with  the  trump  of  God : 
and  the  dead  in  Christ  shall  rise  first :  then  we 
which  are  alive  and  remain  shall  be  caught  up 
together  with  them  in  the  clouds,  to  meet  the 
Lord  in  the  air :  and  so  shall  we  ever  be  with 
the  Lord.  Wherefore  comfort  one  another  with 
these  words." 

And  as  for  us  who  are  in  the  full  flush  and 


AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE  111 

possession  of  all  that  we  have,  it  is  by  hope  that 
we    draw   our    comfort    for    our   struggle.     As 
against  the  background  of  our  defeats  and  fail- 
ures, we  say  to  our  own  hearts:  "Well,  wait, 
just  wait;  my  time  will  come.     No  matter  how 
much  of  this  there  has  been,  some  day  my  hope 
will  be  fulfilled.     It  is  sure  that  something  else 
than   this   there   will  yet   be."     William   Henry 
Green  became  the  outstanding  Hebrew  scholar 
in  America.     He  was  plucked  when  he  entered 
college  in  Latin  and  Greek.     At  Lafayette  Col- 
lege for  months  and  months  he  found  himself 
beaten  on  the  very  batde-field  where  he  stood  at 
last  the  first  man  in  the  land.     At  Lexington, 
Virginia,  several  years  ago,  I  went  to  the  grave 
of  General  Lee  in  the  chancel  of  the  chapel  of 
his  college  and  then  I  went  out  to  the  grave  of 
Stonewall  Jackson  on  that  little  hill.     One  of  his 
townsmen  was  telling  me  the  story  of  Jackson 
and  how  by  hope  he  wrested  triumph  out  of  his 
uttermost  failure.     He  had  been  teaching  in  the 
military  academy,  and  had  just  been  about  to 
give  up  his  work  because  he  had  no  gift  of  dis- 
cipline.    He  could  not  maintain  order  in  his  own 
classroom,  my  friend  said,  and  was  about  to  sur- 
render his  career  as  a  teacher,  because  he  thought 
he  was  incapable  there.     Then  the  war  broke  out, 
and  within  twelve  months  Stonewall  Jackson  was 
the  most  famous  disciplinarian  on  earth.     On  the 
very  field  where  the  man's  failure  had  been  most 


112  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

clear,  there  he  achieved  his  richest  and  greatest 
victory,  by  hope.  And  so  we  comfort  our  hearts 
here  to-day.  "  Yes,"  we  say  to  memories  of 
which  we  are  reminded  in  our  searching  hours, 
"  the  evil  and  unworthy  imaginings  and  desires 
cling  to  us  still,  but  it  will  not  be  forever.  Some 
day,  no  matter  how  often  I  have  failed,  if  I  live 
in  hope,  it  will  come  to  me,  the  clean  thing  that 
the  Lord  said  should  be  mine." 

And  last  of  all,  there  is  nothing  adequate  for 
us  in  the  way  of  actually  moulding  men  and  do- 
ing that  with  life  which  we  were  set  here  to  do 
unless  we  can  go  to  the  work  in  the  spirit  in 
which  our  Lord  and  Saint  Paul  entered  it  If  I 
have  no  hope  for  another  man,  I  cannot  awaken 
any  hope  in  him  for  himself.  Unless  I  believe  in 
him,  how  can  he  believe?  The  glory  of  Christ 
was  that,  though  He  knew  just  what  was  in  man, 
and  saw  all  the  weaknesses  and  the  slavery  and 
the  impurity  and  the  unwholesomeness,  though 
He  saw  all  this  in  man.  He  shut  His  eyes  to  it 
deliberately  and  believed  in  the  better  capacities 
and  possibilities  that  were  there  and  that  He  by 
His  grace  and  His  power  could  plant  and  nurture 
and  bring  out  until  all  that  old  baseness  that  had 
been  the  man  was  not  the  man  any  more,  and  all 
this  new  purity  that  had  not  been  the  man  was 
the  man,  and  Simon  was  turned  at  last  out  of  his 
putty  into  rock  and  stone, 

I  do  not  know  whether  the  apostles  were  con- 


AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE  113 

scious  or  not  of  what  was  happening  to  them. 
Maybe  they  did  not  appreciate  their  Master,  but 
one  likes  to  think  that  they  must  have  done  so, 
and  that  often  they  would  go  off  by  themselves 
and  one  would  say :  "  Andrew,  is  He  not  just 
great?  Did  you  ever  meet  any  one  like  that 
before  ?  Did  you  see  what  He  did  this  morning  ? 
He  just  shut  His  eyes  completely  to  that  mean- 
ness that  He  saw  in  me,  and  that  I  saw  the 
moment  I  let  it  out,  too,  and  He  pretended  that 
He  never  saw  it  at  all,  and  He  believed  in  me 
when  He  knew  and  I  knew  there  was  nothing 
there  to  believe  in.  Is  He  not  wonderful  ?  He 
will  make  a  man  of  me  yet."  And  to  this  day 
He  is  still  doing  just  what  He  was  doing  then. 
In  this  place  now  He  is  doing  just  that  thing.  He 
is  shutting  His  eyes  to  what  we  do  not  want  Him 
to  see  and  opening  them  to  what  only  He  can  see 
in  us.     And  His  law  must  be  our  law. 

I  can  put  it  in  a  little  story  that  a  friend  of  some 
of  us,  George  Truett,  told  to  a  little  group  some 
years  ago  in  a  western  city.  "  I  am  fond,"  he 
said,  "  of  recalling  the  first  soul  it  was  ever  given 
me  to  win  to  Jesus.  I  was  a  lad  barely  grown 
and  a  teacher  in  the  mountains  of  Carolina.  One 
morning,  as  we  were  ready  for  prayers  in  the 
chapel,  there  hobbled  down  the  aisle  to  the  front 
seat  a  boy  of  about  sixteen  years  old.  He  was  an 
eager,  lonely-looking  lad.  I  read  the  Scriptures 
and   prayed  and  then  sent  the  teachers  to  their 


114  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

classes.  But  my  little  cripple  lad  stayed.  I  sup- 
posed that  he  was  a  beggar.  And  I  said  to  my- 
self, '  Surely  this  boy  deserves  alms.  His  condi- 
tion betokens  his  need.'  So  I  went  to  him  at 
recess  and  said,  '  My  lad,  what  do  you  want  ? ' 
He  looked  me  eagerly  in  the  face  and  said  :  '  Mr. 
Truett,  I  want  to  go  to  school.  Oh,  sir,  I  want 
to  be  somebody  in  the  world.  I  will  always  be 
a  cripple.  The  doctors  have  told  me  that,  but,' 
he  said,  '  I  want  to  be  somebody.' 

"  He  had  won  me.  He  told  me  of  their 
poverty,  and  that  was  taken  care  of.  I  watched 
that  lad  for  weeks  and  weeks.  How  bright  his 
mind  was  !  How  eager  he  was  to  know  !  One 
day  I  called  him  into  my  office  and  said  to 
him :  '  My  boy,  I  want  you  to  tell  me  something 
more  about  yourself.'  He  told  me  how,  a  few 
months  before,  his  father  had  been  killed  in  the 
great  cotton  mill  where  he  worked,  and  the  few 
dollars  he  had  saved  up  were  soon  gone.  They 
tried  to  do  their  best  in  the  county  where  they 
were,  but  found  it  difficult ;  so  his  mother  said 
one  day  :  '  Let  us  move  to  the  next  county, 
where  they  do  not  know  us.  Perhaps  we  can  do 
better  where  we  are  not  known.'  So  they  moved 
and  now  he  had  come  into  my  school.  He  said, 
*  I  want  to  help  mother,  and  I  want  to  be  some- 
body in  the  world ;  so  I  made  my  appeal  to  you 
to  come  to  your  school.'  It  was  time  in  a  mo- 
ment for  the  bell  to  ring  for  books.     I  laid  my. 


AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE  115 

hand  on  the  head  of  the  little  fellow  and  said  to 
him  :  *  Jim,  I  am  for  you,  my  boy.  I  believe  in 
you  thoroughly,  and  I  want  you  to  know  that  I 
love  you,  my  boy.'  And  when  I  said  that  last 
word,  the  little  pinched  face  looked  up  into  my 
face  almost  in  a  lightning  flash,  and  he  said : 
•  Mr.  Truett,  did  you  say  you  loved  me  ?  Did 
you  say  that  ? '  I  said,  *  I  said  that,  Jim.'  And 
then  with  a  great  sob  he  said :  '  I  did  not  know 
anybody  loved  me  but  mother  and  the  two  little 
girls.  Mr.  Truett,  if  you  love  me,  I  am  going  to 
be  a  man  yet,  by  the  help  of  God.'  And  when 
a  few  Friday  nights  afterwards  I  was  leading  the 
boys  in  their  chapel  meeting,  as  was  the  custom, 
I  heard  the  boy's  crutches  over  in  the  corner. 
There  Jim  sat,  in  a  chair  away  from  the  other 
boys  to  protect  his  leg.  And  a  little  later  he  got 
up,  sobbing  and  laughing  at  the  same  time,  and 
said,  '  Mr.  Truett,  I  have  found  the  Saviour,  and 
that  time  you  told  me  you  loved  me  started  me 
towards  Him.' "  And  then  our  friend  added, 
"  Brothers,  working  men  in  the  shops  and 
everywhere  are  dying  for  love.  Your  grammar 
may  be  broken,  your  plans  may  be  imperfect, 
your  machinery  may  be  crude,  your  organization 
may  be  rough ;  but  if  you  love  men  and  pour 
your  hearts  out  to  them  honestly  and  directly, 
there  will  be  a  response  that  will  fill  your  hearts 
with  joy  and  heaven  with  praises." 

And  the  need  and  functions  of  hope  should  be 


116  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

viewed  in  no  narrow  personal  way.  We  want 
to-day  men  who  have  a  large  and  courageous 
faith  in  God  for  the  nation  and  the  world.  Of 
recent  years  a  mood  of  pessimism  has  spread 
through  America.  In  one  sense  it  represents  a 
wholesome  reaction  from  the  spirit  of  braggadocio 
and  spreadeagleism  of  an  earlier  day.  So  far 
it  is  wholesome.  We  need  to  be  sobered  and 
made  modest  and  quiet  in  our  national  spirit. 
But  it  is  a  bad  thing  when  a  nation  loses  the  zest 
of  a  great  consciousness  and  a  brave  patriotism, 
and  thinks  meanly  of  what  God  can  do  with  it. 
Our  nation  needs  now  not  a  timid  and  fearful 
sense  of  its  impotence  and  incapacity,  but  a 
realization  that,  whatever  its  difficulties  and  de- 
fects, God  has  a  mission  for  us  which  only  we 
can  fulfill  for  Him.  For  this  mission  those  men 
must  be  the  nation's  soul  of  hope  and  expecta- 
tion who  know  that  our  greatest  duty  and  service 
lie  ahead  of  us  and  are  waiting  to  be  grasped  by 
men  whose  hearts  face  the  untried  without  fear. 

And  now  shall  we  have  this  hope  that  nothing 
can  slay  ?  Do  we  want  it  ?  Well,  it  is  so  near 
to  us  that  we  do  not  need  to  reach  out  after  it. 
You  know  where  it  is,  "  Christ  in  you,  the  hope 
of  glory."  "  The  Lord  Jesus  Christ,"  as  Saint 
Paul  says  in  the  opening  words  of  his  first 
Epistle  to  Timothy,  "The  Lord  Jesus  Christ, 
our  hope."  This  hope  is  not  something  that  we 
work  up  out  of  the  fragments  of  moral  ideals 


AN  UNFRIGHTENED  HOPE  117 

that  we  find  lying  around  in  our  lives  or  our 
nation.  Jesus  Christ  is  the  hope  for  a  man  and 
a  people.  If  we  want  it,  why  not  now  take  Him  ? 
Genuinely,  I  mean,  in  a  deep,  living,  religious 
way,  take  Him  in  His  fullness  of  life  ?  God  and 
the  nation  want  the  men  who  are  filled  with  His 
courage  and  hope : 

"  God's  trumpet  wakes  the  slumbering  world, 
Now  each  man  to  his  post. 
The  red  cross  banner  is  unfurl'd, 
Who  joins  the  glorious  host  ?   Who  joins  the  glorious 

host? 
He  who  in  fealty  to  the  truth 
And  counting  all  the  cost 
Doth  consecrate  his  gen'rous  youth, 
He  joins  the  noble  host !     He  joins  the  noble  host ! 

"  He  who,  no  anger  on  his  tongue 
Nor  any  idle  boast. 

Bears  steadfast  witness  'gainst  the  wrong, 
He  joins  the  sacred  host !     He  joins  the  sacred  host ! 
He  who  with  calm,  undaunted  will 
Ne'er  counts  the  battle  lost 
But  though  defeated  battles  still, 
He  joins  the  faithful  host  1     He  joins  the  faithful 
host! 

"  He  who  is  ready  for  the  cross, 
The  cause  despised  loves  most, 
And  shows  not  pain  or  shame  or  loss, 
He  joins  the  martyr  host !     He  joins  the  martyr 

host! 
God's  trumpet  wakes  the  slumbering  world. 
Now  each  man  to  his  post. 
The  red  cross  banner  is  unfurled. 
We  join  the  glorious  host !     We  join  the  glorious 

host!" 


LECTURE  IV 
THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY 

THERE  are  two  forms  of  disloyalty.  One 
is  flinching,  the  other  is  compromise. 
Of  course,  the  compromiser  will  never 
allow  that  he  is  disloyal.  He  is  a  practical  man 
who  realizes  that  theories  and  ideals  have  to  be 
adapted  to  a  practical  world,  and  he  gives  up  a 
part,  and  as  unimportant  a  part  as  possible,  in 
order  that  he  may  gain  the  rest.  He  feels  him- 
self quite  capable  of  judging  how  much  to  give 
up  and  what  part  may  rightly  be  given  up.  He 
will  simply  abate  the  unreason  of  a  God  who  de- 
mands all  righteousness,  and  to  Whom  the  whole 
truth  is  truth.  Let  us  set  up  against  such  men 
the  uncompromising  principle  of  the  duty  of  non- 
compromise.  It  is  a  principle  from  which  the 
wisest  and  best  of  men  are  sometimes  won  away 
in  the  supposed  interest  of  the  great  ends  which 
they  seek,  and  for  which  they  feel  that  they  may 
rightly  sacrifice  subordinate  issues.  There  is 
what  some  regard  as  a  striking  incident  of  this 
character  in  the  life  of  that  uncompromising 
man,  Saint  Paul.     It  is  an  exciting  and  instruct- 

1X8 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY       119 

ive   story.     This   is   the   way   it  is  told   in  the 
twenty-first  chapter  of  Acts  (vs.  1 7-30) : 

"  And  when  we  were  come  to  Jerusalem,  the  brethren 
received  us  gladly.  And  the  day  following  Paul  went  in 
with  us  unto  James ;  and  all  the  elders  were  present.  And 
when  he  had  saluted  them,  he  rehearsed  one  by  one  the 
things  which  God  had  wrought  among  the  Gentiles  through 
his  ministry.  And  they,  when  they  heard  it,  glorified 
God ;  and  they  said  unto  him,  Thou  seest,  brother,  how 
many  thousands  there  are  among  the  Jews  of  them  that 
have  believed  ;  and  they  are  all  zealous  for  the  law :  and 
they  have  been  informed  concerning  thee,  that  thou  teach- 
est  all  the  Jews  who  are  among  the  Gentiles  to  forsake 
Moses,  telling  them  not  to  circumcise  their  children, 
neither  to  walk  after  the  customs.  What  is  it  therefore  ? 
they  will  certainly  hear  that  thou  art  come.  Do  there- 
fore this  that  we  say  to  thee :  We  have  four  men  that 
have  a  vow  on  them ;  these  take,  and  purify  thyself  with 
them,  and  be  at  charges  for  them,  that  they  may  shave 
their  heads  :  and  all  shall  know  that  there  is  no  truth  in 
the  things  whereof  they  have  been  informed  concerning 
thee ;  but  that  thou  thyself  also  walkest  orderly,  keeping 
the  law.  But  as  touching  the  Gentiles  that  have  believed, 
we  wrote,  giving  judgment  that  they  should  keep  them- 
selves from  things  sacrificed  to  idols,  and  from  blood,  and 
from  what  is  strangled,  and  from  fornication.  Then  Paul 
took  the  men,  and  the  next  day  purifying  himself  with 
them  went  into  the  temple,  declaring  the  fulfillment  of  the 
days  of  purification,  until  the  offering  was  offered  for  every 
one  of  them. 

"  And  when  the  seven  days  were  almost  completed,  the 
Jews  from  Asia,  when  they  saw  him  in  the  temple,  stirred 
up  all  the  multitude  and  laid  hands  on  him,  crying  out, 


120  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

Men  of  Israel,  help  :  This  is  the  man  that  teacheth  all 
men  everywhere  against  the  people,  and  the  law,  and  this 
place ;  and  moreover  he  brought  Greeks  also  into  the 
temple,  and  hath  defiled  this  holy  place.  For  they  had 
before  seen  with  him  in  the  city  Trophimus  the  Ephesian, 
whom  they  supposed  that  Paul  had  brought  into  the  temple. 
And  all  the  city  was  moved,  and  the  people  ran  together ; 
and  they  laid  hold  on  Paul,  and  dragged  him  out  of  the 
temple:  and  straightway  the  doors  were  shut." 

And  that  was  the  disastrous  end  of  this  con- 
scientious experiment.  Paul  never  tried  another 
like  it.  Perhaps  there  is  a  construction  of  the 
story  which  forbids  the  idea  that  it  was  compro- 
mise but  it  suffices  at  any  rate  to  raise  the  whole 
question  of  the  wisdom  of  compromise  as  a  prin- 
ciple of  action.  It  is  the  one  incident  in  Paul's 
Hfe  where  he  might  be  thought  even  for  a  mo- 
ment to  have  embarked  on  that  course.  Wher- 
ever else  we  see  him,  he  is  a  man  of  firm  and 
unflinching  principles,  who  made  no  concealment 
of  what  he  believed,  and  did  not  try  to  adjust 
his  convictions  and  practices  to  other  convictions 
and  practices  that  were  at  variance  with  them. 

In  the  second  chapter  of  Galatians,  you  will 
remember,  Paul  is  telling  of  a  visit  he  made  to 
Jerusalem  some  time  before  with  Barnabas  and 
Titus,  in  which  they  went  up  to  consider  these 
very  questions.  Some  of  the  brethren  in  Jeru- 
salem had  endeavoured  to  persuade  Paul  to  have 
Titus,  who  was  a  Gentile,  circumcised,  and  Paul 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY        121 

says,  "  To  whom  we  gave  place  ...  no,  not 
for  an  hour."  And  then  he  tells  of  the  time  when 
Peter  came  to  Antioch  and  he  withstood  him  to 
his  face  because  he  had  been  a  trimmer  and 
compromiser ;  for  Peter,  acting  on  the  generous 
impulse  of  his  own  heart  as  to  what  was  right, 
had  indeed  bravely  eaten  with  the  converted 
Gentiles,  but  when  some  men  came  down  from 
Jerusalem  who  were  close  to  James,  he  withdrew 
himself  from  the  Gentiles,  fearing,  no  doubt,  that 
it  might  injure  him  in  Jerusalem. 

Paul  does  not  say  anything  in  any  letter  about 
this  particular  incident  in  Jerusalem,  in  which, 
for  the  one  time  in  his  life,  he  was  overpersuaded 
by  his  friends  and  put  in  a  position  where  he 
was  very  much  misunderstood,  and  where  he 
appeared  to  be  compromising  the  great  prin- 
ciples in  which  he  earnestly  believed.  We  know 
what  the  far-reaching  consequences  were.  A 
great  deal  of  trouble  was  brought  into  his  life  by 
this  act.  It  was  out  of  it  that  all  those  succeed- 
ing events  came  which  took  him  at  last  to  Rome 
to  be  tried  before  Caesar.  Some  may  say  that 
these  results  were  good.  Undoubtedly  God  led 
Paul's  course  on,  but  we  may  believe  that  God 
might  have  had  even  greater  things  for  him  to 
do  if  only  he  had  in  this  incident  pursued  his 
customary  course. 

But  we  want  to  go  far  beyond  the  question  as 
to  whether  the  consequences  may  ever  appear  to 


122  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

justify  acts  of  compromise.  A  course  of  action 
is  right  or  wrong,  not  according  to  the  conse- 
quences, but  according  to  its  conformity  or  un- 
conformity to  the  character  of  God.  And  the 
point  now  raised  is  whether  it  is  ever  right  for  us 
to  compromise  our  own  firm  convictions  of  truth 
and  principle. 

Now,  the  world  tells  us  that  such  compromise 
is  to-day  absolutely  unavoidable.  Men  and 
women,  we  are  assured,  cannot  get  along  in  a 
world  like  this  without  adaptations.  If  it  is 
meant  by  this  only  that  we  are  often  obliged  to 
adapt  ourselves  to  that  with  which  we  do  not 
agree,  why,  of  course,  we  have  to  assent,  because 
we  are  in  a  world  of  give  and  take  of  which  we 
have  to  be  a  part,  and  it  is  necessary  for  us  to 
live  our  life  and  do  our  work  in  this  world. 
Here  in  many  of  our  communities,  for  example, 
the  saloons  flourish.  There  is  not  one  of  us  here 
in  this  audience  who  believes  that  it  is  wise  that 
the  saloon  should  exist  under  the  protection  of 
the  government,  but  we  have  to  live  in  a  land 
where  the  principle  with  which  we  disagree  pre- 
vails, and  the  only  way  we  can  escape  is  to  go  to 
some  other  land,  and  we  would  only  find  there 
some  other  principle  with  which  we  could  not 
agree.  We  cannot  live  at  all  unless  we  are  will- 
ing to  adjust  ourselves  to  an  actual  world. 
"Compromise"  when  used  as  the  principle  of 
such  adjustment  means  simply  that  we  must  of 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY        123 

necessity  find  room  for  ourselves  among  the 
crossing  strands  of  life.  "All  government," 
says  Burke,  "  indeed  every  human  benefit  and 
enjoyment,  every  vital  and  every  prudent  act,  is 
founded  on  compromise  and  barter."  "  It  can- 
not be  too  emphatically  asserted,"  says  Spencer, 
"  that  this  policy  of  compromise  alike  in  insti- 
tution, in  action  and  in  belief  which  especially 
characterizes  English  life  is  a  policy  essential  to 
a  society  going  through  the  transition  caused 
by  continuous  growth  and  development."  And 
Emerson  remarks,  "  Almost  all  people  descend 
to  meet.  All  association  must  be  a  compromise, 
and,  what  is  worst,  the  very  flower  and  aroma 
of  the  flower  of  each  of  the  beautiful  natures  dis- 
appears as  they  approach  each  other." 

If  it  is  meant  by  compromise  that  we  have  to 
live  under  conditions  with  which  we  do  not  agree 
and  to  which  we  must  adjust  ourselves,  why,  of 
course,  we  must  assent  to  that — it  is  perfectly 
obvious  ;  but  we  do  not  need  to  live  under  those 
conditions  assenting  to  them.  We  can  bear  our 
testimony  against  whatever  we  morally  disap- 
prove. We  can  assert  our  conviction  by  word 
or  by  the  silent  protest  of  life  that  those  condi- 
tions are  not  right,  and  so  to  live  in  the  midst  of 
conditions  in  which  we  do  not  believe,  but  from 
which  we  cannot  escape,  is  not  compromise.  It 
is  compromise  when  we  surrender  our  principles 
50  that  others  do  not  understand  what  those 


124  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

principles  are,  or  when  we  hold  back  something 
that  is  vital,  or  cover  over  deceptively  or  mis- 
leadingly  something  essential.  When  we  take 
before  men  a  position  that  is  inconsistent  with 
the  position  that  in  our  hearts  we  are  taking  be- 
fore God,  that  is  compromise,  and  that  is  wrong. 
Regarding  the  truth  in  which  we  believe,  the 
principles  by  which  we  know  life  ought  to  be 
lived,  regarding  these  things  there  cannot  be 
compromise,  in  our  lives  or  in  the  Christian 
Church. 

There  is  a  noble  essay  by  Mr.  John  Morley,  as 
he  once  was,  on  this  subject  of  compromise,  its 
nature  and  Jimits,  of  which  Scott  Holland  says 
in  "Lux  Mundi"  that  "no  one  can  read  that 
book  without  being  either  the  better  or  the  worse 
for  it."  In  it  Morley  takes  up  three  different 
spheres  of  life.  First,  the  formation  of  opinion ; 
second,  the  expression  of  opinion  when  it  is  called 
out  from  us ;  and,  third,  the  propagation  of 
opinion ;  and  then  he  pursues  this  line  of  argu- 
ment :  In  the  matter  of  the  formation  of  opinion 
there  cannot  be  any  compromise  at  all.  Every 
one  of  us  is  bound  to  hunt  for  the  truth,  no 
matter  what  the  truth  may  be,  and  when  we 
have  found  it,  to  give  our  lives  absolutely  to  it. 
In  the  realm  of  the  expression  of  opinion,  nobody 
has  any  right  to  deceive  any  one  regarding  his 
principles  and  convictions  when  they  are  called 
forth.     But  in  the  third  place,  he  admits  room 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY       125 

for  compromise  when  it  comes  to  the  aggressive 
propagation  of  our  convictions.  He  says  that 
every  man  is  not  bound  to  propagate  what  he 
believes,  and  he  takes  for  example  his  own 
case, — that  of  a  man  who  does  not  believe  in 
the  Bible,  who  has  abandoned  the  old  religious 
views  of  his  people,  but  who  does  not  regard  it 
as  his  duty  aggressively  to  propagate  his  dis- 
sentient convictions. 

In  his  own  words  his  thesis  is  this : 

"  In  the  positive  endeavour  to  realize  an  opinion,  to 
convert  a  theory  into  practice,  it  may  be,  and  very  often 
is,  highly  expedient  to  defer  to  the  prejudices  of  the  ma- 
jority, to  move  very  slowly,  to  bow  to  the  conditions  of 
the  status  quo,  to  practice  the  very  utmost  sobriety,  self- 
restraint,  and  conciliatoriness.  The  mere  expression  of 
opinion,  in  the  next  place,  the  avowal  of  dissent  from  re- 
ceived notions,  the  refusal  to  conform  to  language  which 
implies  the  acceptance  of  such  notions — this  rests  on  a 
diiferent  footing.  Here  the  reasons  for  respecting  the 
wishes  and  sentiments  of  the  majority  are  far  less  strong, 
though,  as  we  shall  presently  see,  such  reasons  certainly  ex- 
ist, and  will  weigh  with  all  well-considering  men.  Finally, 
in  the  formation  of  an  opinion  as  to  the  abstract  prefer- 
ableness  of  one  course  of  action  over  another,  or  as  to  the 
truth  or  falsehood  or  right  significance  of  a  proposition, 
the  fact  that  the  majority  of  one's  contemporaries  lean  in 
the  other  direction  is  naught,  and  no  more  than  dust  in  the 
balance.  In  making  up  our  minds  as  to  what  would  be 
the  wisest  line  of  policy  if  it  were  practicable,  we  have 
nothing  to  do  with  the  circumstance  that  it  is  not  practi- 


126  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

cable.  And  in  settling  with  ourselves  whether  propositions 
purporting  to  state  matters  of  fact  are  true  or  not,  we  have 
to  consider  how  far  they  are  conformable  to  the  evidence. 
We  have  nothing  to  do  with  the  comfort  and  solace  which 
they  would  be  likely  to  bring  to  others  or  ourselves,  if  they 
were  taken  as  true." 

Now,  we  cannot  but  be  rather  grateful  that 
men,  who  if  they  spoke  would  have  to  oppose 
Christianity,  take  this  view  and  remain  silent, 
and  yet  that  is  not  our  principle.  Believing  in 
Christianity,  we  believe  that  it  would  be  wrong 
and  unworthy  compromise  to  conceal  it  and  to 
refrain  from  propagating  it.  Mr,  Morley  pre- 
fixed to  his  essay  Whately's  saying,  "  It  makes 
all  the  difference  in  the  world  whether  we  put 
truth  in  the  first  place  or  in  the  second  place," 
We  hold  to  another  word  of  Whately's  also  :  "  If 
our  religion  is  false,  we  must  change  it.  If  it  is 
true,  we  must  propagate  it."  Notice  that  Morley 
is  speaking  not  of  his  doubts,  but  of  his  convic- 
tions. There  is  no  obligation  of  a  propaganda 
of  insecurity.  There  is  an  obligation  to  propa- 
gate positive  truth.  It  must,  of  course,  be  the 
truth  that  I  believe.  When  I  am  asked  what  I 
believe  I  must,  of  course,  tell  the  truth.  But  we 
believe  something  far  more  than  that.  The  re- 
ligious truth  that  one  believes  he  must  give  his 
life  to  propagate  throughout  the  world,  and  it 
would  not  make  any  difference  if  he  were  the 
only  man  in  the  world  who  held  that  truth,  it 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY       127 

would  still  be  his  duty,  if  he  believed  it  was  the 
truth  and  the  great  and  necessary  truth  of  life,  to 
go  out  single-handed  to  defend  and  propagate  it. 
Athanasius  is  regarded  as  an  impracticable  and 
troublesome  type  but  the  progress  of  the  world 
is  often  lifted  forward  a  sheer  and  discernible 
stage  by  such  uncompromisingness. 

Let  us  set  forth  some  of  the  reasons  why  we 
may  believe  that  there  dare  not  be,  in  our  Chris- 
tian life  and  our  Christian  service,  any  compro- 
mise whatever,  either  in  our  searching  for  the 
truth,  in  our  utterance  of  the  truth,  or  in  our 
aggressive  and  active  propagation  of  the  truth 
throughout  the  world.  This  is  to  put  the  matter, 
of  course,  very  broadly  and  sweepingly.  There 
is  a  great  deal  to  be  said  for  some  of  Morley's 
nice  discriminations.  But  actual  life  is  a  very 
rough  and  imperative  and  elemental  thing.  The 
difficulty  of  acting  on  any  body  of  wary  and 
wavery  casuistical  principles  is  enormous.  The 
really  workable  principle  of  actual  living  must 
be  very  simple  and  uncomplicated  and  direct. 
The  only  safe  ethical  law  is  "  No  lie,"  no  lie 
whatever  or  under  any  justification.  So  also, 
however  crude  and  blunt  the  rule  may  be,  "  No 
compromise"  is  the  only  practicable  right  rule. 
Mr.  Morley  closed  his  essay  with  such  a.  plain 
word :  "  It  is  better  to  bear  the  burden  of  im- 
practicableness,  than  to  stifle  conviction  and  to 
pare  away  principle  until  it  becomes  mere  hoi- 


128  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

lowness  and  triviality."  And  in  the  beginning  he 
wrote:  "  Our  day  of  small  calculations  and  petty 
utilities  must  first  pass  away ;  our  vision  of  the 
true  expediencies  must  reach  further  and  deeper  ; 
our  resolution  to  search  for  the  highest  verities, 
to  give  up  all  and  follow  them,  must  first  become 
the  supreme  part  of  ourselves."  The  loss  by 
compromise  to  ourselves  and  others  is  certain, 
while  its  gain  is  uncertain  and  problematical. 

In  the  first  place,  one  believes  this  because 
compromise  makes  no  contribution  to  the  settle- 
ment of  the  real  issue  over  truth.  It  is  true  that 
all  the  boundaries  between  truth  and  error  are 
not  clear  and  sharply  drawn  lines.  Often  there 
is  a  gray  and  misty  region  between.  And  much 
truth  is  only  slowly  and  gradually  won.  But  the 
ideal  of  truth  is  clearer  than  the  sun  and  as  pure 
as  the  character  of  God.  And  we  have  a  far 
richer  chance  of  winning  it  and  all  that  it  brings 
with  it,  if  we  both  think  and  live  it  uncompro- 
misingly. "  The  political  spirit,"  says  Mr.  Morley 
in  noble  words,  "  is  the  great  force  in  throwing 
love  of  truth  and  accurate  reasoning  into  a  sec- 
ondary place.  The  evil  does  not  stop  here.  This 
achievement  has  indirectly  countenanced  the 
postponement  of  intellectual  methods,  and  the 
diminution  of  the  sense  of  intellectual  responsi- 
bility, by  a  school  that  is  anything  rather  than 
political.  Theology  has  borrowed,  and  coloured 
for  her  own  use,  the  principles  which  were  first 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY       l29 

brought  into  vogue  in  politics.  If  in  the  one 
field  it  is  the  fashion  to  consider  convenience 
first  and  truth  second,  in  the  other  there  is  a  cor- 
responding fashion  of  placing  truth  second  and 
emotional  comfort  first.  If  there  are  some  who 
compromise  their  real  opinions,  or  the  chance  of 
reaching  truth,  for  the  sake  of  gain,  there  are  far 
more  who  shrink  from  giving  their  intelligence 
free  play,  for  the  sake  of  keeping  undisturbed 
certain  luxurious  spiritual  sensibilities.     .     .     . 

"  The  intelligence  is  not  free  in  the  presence 
of  a  mortal  fear  lest  its  conclusions  should  trouble 
soft  tranquillity  of  spirit.  There  is  always  hope 
of  a  man  so  long  as  he  dwells  in  the  region  of 
the  direct  categorical  proposition  and  the  un- 
ambiguous term ;  so  long  as  he  does  not  deny 
the  rightly  drawn  conclusions  after  accepting  the 
major  and  minor  premises.  This  may  seem  a 
scanty  virtue  and  very  easy  grace.  Yet  experi- 
ence shows  it  to  be  too  hard  of  attainment  for 
those  who  tamper  with  disinterestedness  of  con- 
viction, for  the  sake  of  luxuriating  in  the  softness 
of  spiritual  transport  without  interruption  from  a 
syllogism.  It  is  true  that  there  are  now  and 
then  in  life  as  in  history  noble  and  fair  natures, 
that  by  the  silent  teaching  and  unconscious  ex- 
ample of  their  inborn  purity,  star-like  constancy, 
and  great  devotion,  do  carry  the  world  about 
them  to  further  heights  of  living  than  can  be  at- 
tained by  ratiocination.     But  these,  the  blame- 


130  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

less  and  loved  saints  of  the  earth,  rise  too  rarely 
on  our  dull  horizons  to  make  a  rule  for  the  world. 
The  law  of  things  is  that  they  who  tamper  with 
veracity,  from  whatever  motive,  are  tampering 
with  the  vital  force  of  human  progress.  Our 
comfort  and  the  delight  of  the  religious  imagina- 
tion are  no  better  than  forms  of  self-indulgence, 
when  they  are  secured  at  the  cost  of  that  love  of 
truth  on  which,  more  than  on  anything  else,  the 
increase  of  light  and  happiness  among  men  must 
depend.  We  have  to  fight  and  do  lifelong  bat- 
tle against  the  forces  of  darkness,  and  anything 
that  turns  the  edge  of  reason  blunts  the  surest 
and  most  potent  of  our  weapons."  We  do  not 
believe  in  compromising,  because  it  makes  no 
contribution  to  the  larger  discerning  of  truth  or 
the  triumphing  of  that  truth  over  error. 

In  the  second  place,  we  do  not  believe  in  it 
because  it  creates  a  great  many  more  difficulties 
than  it  removes.  Now,  Paul  was  invited  to  this 
compromising  course  in  Jerusalem  by  his  mis- 
guided friends  because  they  thought  it  would 
avoid  trouble.  They  wanted  to  set  Paul  right 
with  the  Jewish  Christians  in  the  city,  and  maybe 
with  the  Jews  who  were  not  Christians ;  they 
wanted  to  remove  an  impression  which  they 
thought  prevailed  regarding  Paul's  attitude 
towards  the  Mosaic  customs  in  the  Gentile 
world. 

Now,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  principle  of  that 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY       131 

impression  was  true,  for  although,  as  Dr.  Mc- 
Giffert  says,  Paul 

"recognized  the  legitimacy  of  Jewish  Christianity,  and 
the  right  of  Peter  and  other  apostles  to  preach  to  the  Jews 
the  Gospel  of  circumcision,  and  though  there  is  no  evi- 
dence that  he  ever  undertook  to  lead  the  Jews  as  a  people 
to  cease  observing  their  ancestral  law,  he  had  certainly 
been  in  the  habit  of  insisting  that  his  Jewish  converts 
should  associate  on  equal  terms  with  their  Gentile  breth- 
ren, and  that  they  should  not  allow  their  law  to  act  in  any 
way  as  a  barrier  to  the  freest  and  most  intimate  association 
with  them.  But  this,  of  course,  meant,  in  so  far,  their 
violation  of  the  law's  commands.  It  is  certain  also  that 
Paul  had  preached  for  years  the  doctrine  that  not  the  Gen- 
tile Christian  alone  but  the  Jewish  Christian  as  well  is  ab- 
solutely free  from  all  obligation  to  keep  the  law  of  Moses, 
and  though  such  teaching  might  not  always  result  in  a  dis- 
regard of  that  law  by  his  Jewish  converts,  it  must  have  a 
tendency  to  produce  that  effect  and  doubtless  did  in  many 
cases.  It  is  clear  therefore  tliat  both  accusations  had  much 
truth  in  them,  and  it  is  difficult  to  suppose  that  Paul  can 
have  deliberately  attempted  in  Jerusalem  to  prove  them 
wholly  false. 

♦*  And  yet,  though  as  an  honourable  man  and  a  man  of 
principle  he  can  hardly  have  undertaken  to  demonstrate 
that  there  was  no  truth  in  the  reports  which  were  circu- 
lated concerning  him,  it  may  well  be  that  he  tried  to  show 
that  they  were  not  wholly  true.  It  was  evidently  assumed 
by  those  who  accused  him  of  •  teaching  all  the  Jews  which 
are  among  the  Gentiles  to  forsake  Moses,  telling  them  not 
to  circumcise  their  children,  neither  to  walk  after  the  cus- 
toms,' that  he  hated  the  Jewish  law  and  that  he  was  doing 
all  that  lay  in  his  power  to  destroy  it ;  that  he  believed 


132  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

and  that  he  taught  everywhere  that  its  observance  was  un- 
der  any  and  all  circumstances  a  positive  sin.  But  this 
assumption  was  not  true.  Paul  was  certainly  not  hostile 
to  the  law  in  any  such  sense.  He  believed  that  it  had  no 
binding  authority  over  a  Christian,  and  he  opposed  with 
all  his  might  the  idea  that  its  observance  had  any  value  as 
a  means  of  salvation,  or  that  it  contributed  in  any  way  to 
the  believer's  righteousness  or  growth  in  grace ;  but  he 
held  no  such  view  of  the  law  as  made  its  observance  neces- 
sarily sinful,  and  rendered  it  impossible  for  him  ever  to 
observe  it  himself  in  any  respect.  And  it  was  not  at  all 
unnatural  that  he  should  desire  to  convince  the  Christians 
of  Jerusalem  of  the  fact ;  especially  when  he  had  come 
thither  with  the  express  purpose  of  conciliating  them  and 
winning  their  favour  for  himself  and  for  his  Gentile  con- 
verts. He  would  have  been  very  foolish  under  these  cir- 
cumstances to  allow  such  a  false  impression  touching  his 
attitude  towards  the  law  to  go  uncontradicted."  * 

This  is  a  satisfactory  defense  if  one  were  needed 
of  Paul's  course,  but  no  one  would  question  his 
motive.  That  was  right  enough  and  he  evidently 
acted  in  all  good  conscience,  but  the  procedure, 
instead  of  getting  him  out  of  his  trouble,  got  him 
into  worse  trouble.  It  always  does  that.  I  do  not 
believe  any  man  was  ever  permanently  helped 
by  compromise.  Every  man  who  has  begun  to 
play  with  it  has  been  drawn  into  worse  diffi- 
culties and  troubles,  or  has  gone  down,  perhaps 
without  conscious  difficulty  but  with  real  moral 
loss,  to   a  lower  level   of  life.     For  one  thing, 

» "  The  Apostolic  Age,"  p.  341. 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY        133 

compromise  blurs  the  line  of  cleavage  between 
truth  and  error,  and  that  is  exacdy  what  no  one 
of  us  can  afford  to  have  done.  We  do  not  want 
the  lines  of  distinction  between  what  is  true  and 
what  is  false  slurred  over  for  us.  We  want  them 
sharpened  so  that  we  shall  make  as  litde  mistake 
as  possible  as  to  where  they  lie.  Furthermore 
compromise  gets  us  into  more  difficulty  than  it 
removes,  because  it  throws  together  things  that 
are  not  congruous  or  reconcilable.  This  is  its 
very  nature.  It  brings  into  one  bed  things  that 
cannot  sleep  together,  into  one  union  things 
that  cannot  be  tied.  And  it  postpones  real  set- 
dements  in  the  interest  of  spurious  arrange- 
ments, sacrificing  some 

**  greater  good  for  the  less,  on  no  more  creditable  ground 
than  that  the  less  is  nearer.  It  is  better  to  wait,  and  to 
defer  the  reahzation  of  our  ideas  until  we  can  realize  them 
fully,  than  to  defraud  the  future  by  truncating  them,  if 
truncate  them  we  must,  in  order  to  secure  a  partial  triumph 
for  them  in  the  immediate  present.  .  .  .  What  is  the 
sense,  and  what  is  the  morality,  of  postponing  the  wider 
utility  to  the  narrower  ?  Nothing  is  so  sure  to  impoverish 
an  epoch,  to  deprive  conduct  of  nobleness,  and  character 
of  elevation." 

These  are  Mr.  Morley's  closing  words.  This  is 
the  second  reason  why  we  believe  there  can  be 
no  room  for  compromise  in  our  Christian  life  or 
service. 

In  the  third  place,  it  encourages  evil  by  mak- 


134  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

ing  it  think  that  having  got  so  much  it  can  get 
the  rest,  and  so  it  prolongs  the  life  of  evil.  That 
is  exactly  what  compromise  did  in  the  old  days 
of  slavery.  Every  one  of  those  early  com- 
promises prolonged  the  life  of  evil  which  at  last 
the  nation  had  to  pour  out  its  blood  to  destroy. 
That  is  what  compromise  always  does.  It  per- 
suades evil  that,  after  all,  maybe  evil  can  win  the 
victory,  that  having  gotten  so  much  from  us  it 
can  get  the  rest  if  only  it  will  be  patient,  and  we 
simply  increase  the  courage  of  our  foe  in  pro- 
portion as  we  make  any  compromise  with  him 
instead  of  standing  up  face  to  face  against  him 
from  the  very  beginning.  And  so  it  destroys  the 
power  and  might  of  right  causes  by  mixing  in 
the  taint  of  wrong.  You  do  not  make  a  good 
man  better  by  putting  a  dash  of  bad  in  him. 
You  do  not  make  a  good  cause  stronger  by  let- 
ting the  evil  come  in ;  you  only  weaken  its 
strength  and  power.  Compromise  plays  into 
the  hands  of  the  very  evil  which  we  are  here  to 
overcome  and  destroy. 

In  the  fourth  place,  compromise  breaks  down 
the  strength  of  rigid  consistency,  and  by  letting 
in  one  qualification  prepares  the  way  for  others. 
That  is  the  reason  why  it  is  so  much  harder  for 
a  man  to  be  a  moderate  drinker  than  to  be  a 
total  abstainer.  As  was  said  of  Samuel  Johnson, 
"  He  could  practice  abstinence  but  not  temper- 
ance."    When  a  man  has  made  up  his  mind  that 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY        135 

he  will  never  do  a  thing,  it  is  a  great  deal  easier 
for  him  to  refuse  to  do  it  in  any  given  instance 
than  if  he  has  made  up  his  mind  that  he  will  do 
it  moderately,  because  he  never  knows  when  he 
ceases  to  be  moderate.  There  is  a  sharp  line 
between  moderate  drinking  and  total  abstinence. 
That  boundary  line  no  one  can  ever  mistake, 
but  the  boundary  line  between  intemperance  and 
moderation  is  not  located  anywhere.  There  is 
no  definite  border  between  those  two  countries. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  every  man  starts  in  by  being 
a  moderate  drinker.  He  never  intended  to  be- 
come anything  else  but  a  moderate  drinker  when 
he  began.  But  there  is  a  boundary  line  so  clear 
that  a  blind  man  can  see  it  between  yes  and  no, 
between  not  doing  a  thing  at  all  and  doing  that 
thing  only  moderately.  We  believe  in  the  prin- 
ciple of  absolutely  no  compromise  in  moral  habit 
and  principle,  and  we  believe  in  the  same  prin- 
ciple in  our  clear  and  evangelical  convictions  re- 
garding the  Christian  faith. 

In  the  fifth  place,  we  ought  to  shun  all  such 
compromise  because  it  undermines  our  confidence 
in  men,  and  the  solid  unity  of  their  cooperative 
action.  We  know  where  truth  is,  but  we  never 
know  where  calculating  compromise  may  be.  In 
the  language  of  the  deaf  and  dumb  this  is  the 
sign  for  truth — a  straight  line  right  away  from 
your  mouth — for  the  simple  reason  that  between 
two  points  there  is  only  one  straight  line,  but 


136  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

there  may  be  many  crooked  lines.  The  truth  is 
always  a  single  thing,  but  the  error, — no  man 
knows  what  it  may  be.  No  compromise  makes 
possible  unity  of  accord  by  giving  people  one 
standard  on  which  they  can  rely,  and  by  supply- 
ing confidence  in  the  stability  of  men  and  their 
convictions.  But  we  cannot  follow  the  com- 
promising man,  for  as  soon  as  he  gets  out  of  our 
sight  we  do  not  know  where  he  will  be. 

It  is  the  man  who  makes  no  compromise,  who 
stands  fast  by  truth,  that  we  know  we  can  locate. 
It  was  that  which  gave  Stonewall  Jackson  his 
huge  power  as  a  leader  of  men  in  the  Civil  War. 
He  was  a  man  of  the  most  unflinching  Christian 
convictions.  He  was  one  who  never  moved  the 
breadth  of  a  hair  from  his  loyalty  to  his  Lord  or 
to  truth  as  he  saw  truth  in  the  presence  of  his 
Lord.  Colonel  Henderson  draws  for  us  a  rich 
picture  of  the  great  soldier's  character  and  it  is 
full  of  genial  and  kindly  touches,  but  it  is  faithful 
also  in  its  account  of  the  man's  rigid  and  inflex- 
ible righteousness. 

"  Jackson's  religion  entered  into  every  action  of  his  life. 
No  duty,  however  trivial,  was  begun  without  asking  a 
blessing,  or  ended  without  returning  thanks.  *  He  had 
long  cultivated,'  he  said,  *  the  habit  of  connecting  the  most 
trivial  and  customary  acts  of  life  with  a  silent  prayer.'  He 
took  the  Bible  as  his  guide,  and  it  is  possible  that  his  lit- 
eral interpretation  of  its  precepts  caused  many  to  regard 
him  as  a  fanatic.     His  observance  of  the  Sabbalh  wag 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY       137 

hardly  in  accordance  with  ordinary  usage.  He  never  read 
a  letter  on  that  day,  nor  posted  one  ;  he  believed  that  the 
Government  in  carrying  the  mails  was  violating  a  divine 
law,  and  he  considered  the  suppression  of  such  traffic  one 
of  the  most  important  duties  of  the  legislature.  Such 
opinions  were  uncommon,  even  among  the  Presbyterians, 
and  his  rigid  respect  for  truth  served  to  strengthen  the  im- 
pression that  he  was  morbidly  scrupulous.  If  he  uninten- 
tionally made  a  misstatement — even  about  some  trifling 
matter — as  soon  as  he  discovered  his  mistake  he  would  lose 
no  time  and  spare  no  trouble  in  hastening  to  correct  it, 
'  Why,  in  the  name  of  reason,'  he  was  asked,  *  do  you  walk 
a  mile  in  the  rain  for  a  perfectly  unimportant  thing  ?  * 
*  Simply  because  I  have  discovered  that  it  was  a  misstate- 
ment, w.nd  I  could  not  sleep  comfortably  unless  I  put  it 
right.' 

"  He  had  occasion  to  censure  a  cadet  who  had  given,  as 
Jackson  believed,  the  wrong  solution  of  a  problem.  On 
thinking  the  matter  over  at  home,  he  found  that  the  pupil 
was  right  and  the  teacher  wrong.  It  was  late  at  night  and 
in  the  depth  of  winter,  but  he  immediately  started  off  to 
the  Institute,  some  distance  from  his  quarters,  and  sent  for 
the  cadet.  The  delinquent,  answering  with  much  trepida- 
tion the  untimely  summons,  found  himself  to  his  astonish- 
ment the  recipient  of  a  frank  apology.  Jackson's  scruples 
carried  him  even  further.  Persons  who  interlarded  their 
conversation  with  the  unmeaning  phrase  *  you  know '  were 
often  astonished  by  the  blunt  interruption  that  he  did  not 
know ;  and  when  he  was  entreated  at  parties  or  receptions 
to  break  through  his  dietary  rules,  and  for  courtesy's  sake 
to  seem  to  accept  some  delicacy,  he  would  always  refuse 
with  the  reply  that  he  had  'no  genius  for  seeming.'  But 
if  he  carried  his  conscientiousness  to  extremes,  if  he  laid 


138  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

down  stringent  rules  for  his  own  governance,  he  neither  set 
himself  up  for  a  model  nor  did  he  attempt  to  force  his  con- 
victions upon  others.  He  was  always  tolerant ;  he  knew 
his  own  faults,  and  his  own  temptations,  and  if  he  could 
say  nothing  good  of  a  man  he  would  not  speak  of  him  at 
all.  But  he  was  by  no  means  disposed  to  overlook  con- 
duct of  which  he  disapproved,  and  undue  leniency  was  a 
weakness  to  which  he  never  yielded.  If  he  once  lost  con- 
fidence or  discovered  deception  on  the  part  of  one  he 
trusted,  he  withdrew  himself  as  far  as  possible  from  any 
further  dealings  with  him ;  and  whether  with  the  cadets  or 
with  his  brother-officers,  if  an  offense  had  been  committed  of 
which  he  was  called  upon  to  take  notice,  he  was  absolutely 
inflexible.  Punishment  or  report  inevitably  followed.  No 
excuses,  no  personal  feelings,  no  appeals  to  the  suffering 
which  might  be  brought  upon  the  innocent,  were  permitted 
to  interfere  with  the  execution  of  his  duty." 

"  As  exact  as  the  multiplication  table,"  some  one 
said  of  him,  "  and  as  full  of  things  military  as  an 
arsenal."  Those  of  us  who  are  looking  for  the 
secret  of  Christian  influence  over  others  may  be 
sure  that  we  will  find  it  here.  Men  are  not  going 
to  follow  the  shifting  man.  They  will  follow  the 
man  who  makes  no  compromise,  who  has  his  firm 
convictions  and  who  stands  by  those  convictions, 
no  matter  what  the  cost  of  his  loyalty  may  be. 
Recent  American  politics  are  rather  eloquent  and 
convincing  on  this  point. 

In  the  sixth  place,  compromise  in  principle 
substitutes  reliance  upon  majorities  for  reliance 
upon  the  truth,  and  the  majorities  never  have 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINOKITY       139 

been  right  and  we  may  doubt  whether,  until  our 
Lord  Jesus  Christ  comes  again,  they  ever  will  be 
right.  God  never  has  relied  upon  the  majority. 
He  never  has  waited  to  do  His  worlc  until  it  was 
ready  to  side  with  Him.  In  all  ages  God  has 
done  His  work  by  the  few.  In  Old  Testament 
times  He  did  it  by  the  few.  The  one  principle 
prevailed  always — not  by  might,  nor  by  power. 
It  was  ever  only  "  the  Sword  of  the  Lord  and  of 
Gideon."  When  our  Lord  came  He  did  His  work 
with  the  few.  Through  all  the  ages  God  has 
been  working  so,  and  we  simply  depart  from  His 
whole  method  in  history  when  by  compromise 
we  try  to  get  the  force  of  the  majority  on  our 
side.  The  force  of  the  majority  does  not  amount 
to  anything  in  comparison  with  the  force  of  truth. 
"The  history  of  success,"  says  Mr.  Morley,  "as 
we  can  never  too  often  repeat  to  ourselves,  is  the 
history  of  minorities."  And  we  do  not  believe 
in  compromise  because  it  substitutes  our  reliance 
upon  the  majority  for  our  reliance  upon  the  truth 
of  God,  and  upon  the  strength  of  God  to  enable 
the  few  with  the  truth  to  triumph  against  the 
error  of  the  crowd.  This  passes  for  foolish  ideal- 
ism and  some  of  our  most  popular  political  lead- 
ers and  reformers  have  poured  scorn  upon  the 
idealists  and  dreamers,  who  are  not  to  be  num- 
bered among  the  practical  men. 

"One  would  like  to  ask  them  what  purpose  is  served  by 
an  ideal,   if  it  is  not  to  make  a  guide  for  practice  and  a 


140  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

landmark  in  dealing  with  the  real.  A  man's  loftiest  and 
most  ideal  notions  must  be  of  a  singularly  ethereal  and, 
shall  we  not  say,  senseless  kind,  if  he  can  never  see  how 
to  take  a  single  step  that  may  tend  in  the  slightest  degree 
towards  making  them  more  real.  If  an  ideal  has  no  point 
of  contact  with  what  exists,  it  is  probably  not  much  more 
than  the  vapid  outcome  of  intellectual  or  spiritual  self-in- 
dulgence. If  it  has  such  a  point  of  contact,  then  there  is 
sure  to  be  something  which  a  man  can  do  towards  the  ful- 
fillment of  his  hopes.  He  cannot  substitute  a  new  national 
religion  for  the  old,  but  he  can  at  least  do  something  to 
prevent  people  from  supposing  that  the  adherents  of  the  old 
are  more  numerous  than  they  really  are,  and  something  to 
show  them  that  good  ideas  are  not  all  exhausted  by  the 
ancient  forms.  He  cannot  transform  a  monarchy  into  a 
republic,  but  he  can  make  sure  that  one  citizen  at  least 
shall  aim  at  republican  virtues,  and  abstain  from  the  de- 
basing complaisance  of  the  crowd."  ' 

And  we  might  add,  "  he  cannot  instantly  make 
truth  the  life  of  the  nation,  but  he  can  be  loyal  to 
its  commandments.  He  cannot  make  political 
leaders  honest  and  patriotic,  but  he  can  refuse  to 
profit  by  their  dishonesty  or  to  regard  them  as 
honest  men  if  they  will  but  wear  his  badge  and 
seek  their  own  ends  by  promoting  his.  He  can 
form  his  own  ideals  of  honour  and  glory  and  live 
by  them  whatever  way  others  may  go." 

In  the  seventh  place,  compromise  increases  in 
peril  as  we  draw  near  the  highest.  If  you  take 
a  man  who  is  down  on  the  lower  levels,  com- 

*  Morley,  "  Compromise,"  p.  226. 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY        141 

promise  does  not  mean  as  much  to  him  as  it 
does  to  men  who  have  been  climbing  up.  The 
nearer  we  come  to  Christ  and  the  highest  truth, 
the  more  perilous  does  compromise  become.  As 
Edward  Thring  said :  "  In  proportion  to  excel- 
lence, compromise  is  impossible.  A  single  leak 
sinks  a  great  ship,  a  raft  that  is  all  leaks  floats." 
That  is  just  the  deep  lesson  that  men  and  women 
need  to  learn ;  that  the  higher  and  cleaner  and 
more  morally  lofty  or  exacting  the  life,  the  more 
perilous  compromise  becomes  to  it.  One  has 
heard  Christian  men  say  sometimes  that  they 
thought  they  were  safe  in  doing  what  this  or 
that  man,  not  as  strong  or  experienced  or  ma- 
ture, could  do.  It  is  a  great  mistake.  The  clearer 
and  stronger  a  man's  life,  the  more  careful  must 
the  man  be,  the  more  solicitous,  the  more  anx- 
ious, lest  thinking  he  stands  he  falls.  One  of 
the  greatest  things  about  the  life  of  Paul  was  the 
humility  and  self-distrust  in  which  he  walked, 
fearing  lest  when  he  had  preached  to  others  he 
himself  might  be  a  castaway.  We  have  to  learn 
that  here  lies  power  and  duty,  and  that  the 
cleaner  Christ  makes  any  human  life,  the  more 
careful  must  that  life  be  to  keep  all  its  habits 
pure  and  unsullied,  and  its  convictions  of  truth 
unflinching  and  firm. 

It  was  this  principle  that  made  our  friend, 
S.  H.  Hadley,  and  that  makes  so  many  men 
who  have  escaped  from  the  slavery  of  drink,  go 


142  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

to  extremes  in  cutting  off  physical  indulgences. 
Mr.  Hadley  not  only  dropped  once  and  forever 
the  use  of  alcohol,  but  he  stopped  tobacco  too, 
and  he  tried  to  get  every  drunkard  whom  he  was 
seeking  to  save  to  discontinue  the  use  of  nico- 
tine. He  held  that  men  should  be  clean  every 
whit  and  his  strong  conviction  was  that  while  he 
would  not  for  a  moment  class  such  indulgences 
together,  nevertheless  the  man  who  wanted  to 
be  free  from  the  one  would  find  his  deliverance 
far  easier  if  he  sloughed  off  the  other  also.  It  is 
safer  and  easier  to  be  thoroughgoing  and  indis- 
criminate, if  you  will,  than  to  be  always  calculat- 
ing how  great  risks  can  be  safely  run. 

And,  lastly,  we  believe  in  no  compromise  be- 
cause the  truth  is  bound  to  prevail,  and  it  will 
triumph  the  soonest  when  it  is  least  hampered 
and  tied  up  with  error  or  with  qualification. 
One  might  stop  here  to  make  a  defense  on  this 
ground  of  the  fanatics  and  devotees,  but  it 
is  enough  to  say  that  the  truth  is  going  to  pre- 
vail because  it  is  God's  truth,  and  hell  and  all 
hell's  power  in  the  world  cannot  stand  against  it. 
What  is  the  use  in  delaying  the  day  of  that  tri- 
umph by  compromising  with  error  ?  The  right 
will  prevail  all  the  faster  if  we  make  no  com- 
promise with  error,  if  we  go  out  and  preach 
unflinchingly  and  courageously  with  no  com- 
promise, with  no  surrender  or  economy  or  adap- 
tations, the  hard,  plain  truth  of  God  as  we  see 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY        143 

it.  If  what  we  think  is  truth  is  really  error,  it 
will  be  the  sooner  beaten  down  for  being  made 
to  stand  up  for  itself.  But  if  it  is  indeed  the 
truth  we  know  it  will  prevail  the  more  in  the 
world  as  we  keep  it  free  from  all  connection  with 
anything  that  will  weaken  or  becloud  it. 

I  know  how  much  danger  there  is  in  such  an 
attitude  as  this  if  we  take  it  up  towards  the  truth 
that  we  hold.  It  lies  in  our  human  nature  to  go 
to  violence  or  extremes  with  everything.  Martin 
Luther  used  to  say  that  human  nature  is  like  a 
drunken  man  trying  to  ride  a  horse,  you  prop 
him  up  on  one  side  and  he  topples  over  on  the 
other.  It  is  that  way  with  us.  We  try  to  be 
firm  and  we  become  hard-hearted.  We  pride 
ourselves  on  uncompromising  loyalty  to  the 
truth  and  we  lack  the  tenderness  and  sympathy. 
Moreover,  as  Bushnell  said  in  his  essay  on 
"  Christian  Comprehensiveness  "  : 

**  It  is  the  common  infirmity  of  mere  human  reformers 
that,  when  they  rise  up  to  cast  out  an  error,  it  is  generally 
not  till  they  have  kindled  their  passions  against  it.  If  they 
begin  with  reason,  they  are  commonly  moved,  in  the  last 
degree,  by  their  animosities  instead  of  reason.  And  as 
animosities  are  blind,  they,  of  course,  see  nothing  to  re- 
spect, nothing  to  spare.  The  question  whether  possibly 
there  may  not  be  some  truth  or  good  in  the  error  assailed, 
which  is  needed  to  qualify  and  save  the  equilibrium  of 
their  own  opposing  truth,  is  not  once  entertained.  Hence 
it   is   that   men,   in  expelling  one  error,  are   perpetually 


144  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

thrusting  themselves  into  another,  as  if  unwilling  or  un- 
able to  hold  more  than  half  the  truth  at  once." 

And  yet  these  dangers  are  lesser  dangers  than 
the  danger  of  surrendering  the  truth.  And  we 
can  be  guarded  from  them  by  the  great  and  un- 
selfish love  that  guarded  Paul.  The  man  who 
loves  others  more  than  he  loves  himself,  who 
holds  human  lives  sacred  and  free  from  invasion, 
who  is  seeking  not  his  own  glory,  but  the  glory 
of  God  and  the  good  of  men,  is  in  little  danger 
from  an  absolutely  uncompromising  loyalty  to 
the  truth. 

And  if  ever  men  have  any  doubts  or  misgivings 
regarding  this,  or  if  the  time  of  discouragements 
and  fears  comes  to  them,  and  they  look  with  long- 
ing to  the  multitudes  who  act  together,  while 
they  think  of  themselves  as  just  a  few,  bearing 
testimony  for  the  truth  against  error  and  sin,  they 
may  encourage  themselves  with  Mr.  Matthew 
Arnold's  doctrine  of  the  remnant,  or  better  yet, 
by  remembering  the  great  Solitary,  Jesus  Christ. 
How  lonesomely  He  walked  His  way ;  seeing 
what  no  other  soul  was  seeing ;  standing  alone 
for  the  great  truth  which  He  uttered,  and  at  last 
meeting  death  upon  the  cross  alone  ;  one  of  His 
disciples  having  betrayed  Him,  another  having 
three  times  denied  that  he  ever  knew  Him,  and 
all  the  others  having  left  Him  and  gone  away  ! 
And  yet  as  we  look  back,  we  see  that  lonely  cross 
ruling  the  whole  world,  and  that  forsaken  figure 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY       145 

men  are  clothing  now  with  the  crown  of  everlast- 
ing light,  and  His  name  is  above  every  name. 
All  that  we  are  asked  to  do  is  simply  to  follow  in 
His  train,  to  take  up  the  truth  which  He  opened, 
and  for  that  truth  to  be  willing  to  live,  and, 
which  is  far  easier,  if  need  be,  to  die.  Our  lives 
are  ours  for  this  one  thing,  that  through  them, 
without  compromise  with  error  or  with  sin,  God 
may  bear  testimony  to  Himself,  and  whether  He 
does  that  through  many  years  or  through  few, 
through  peaceful  personal  service  or  through 
storm  and  tragedy,  is  of  no  consequence.  The 
one  thing  that  is  of  consequence  is  that  we  should 
know  and  be  true  to  God. 

But  there  is  a  better  way  to  set  forth  and  com- 
mend this  principle  as  a  law  of  life  than  by  argu- 
ing it  in  these  general  terms.  Let  the  principle 
put  on  flesh  and  live  before  us  in  a  man : 

"  And  Elijah  the  Tishbite,  who  was  of  the  so- 
journers of  Gilead,  said  unto  Ahab,  As  the  Lord, 
the  God  of  Israel,  liveth,  before  whom  I  stand, 
there  shall  not  be  dew  nor  rain  these  years,  but 
according  to  my  word." 

The  old  man  who  spoke  these  words  was  one 
of  the  four  great  characters  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment. He  and  Moses  and  Samuel  and  David 
stood  apart  in  the  thought  of  the  Hebrew  people. 
Indeed,  there  was  a  sense  in  which  he  and  Moses 
were  in  a  class  by  themselves.  The  appearance 
of  those  two  with  our  Lord  on  the  Mountain  of 


146  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

Transfiguration  was  only  an  illustration  of  the 
place  which  they  held  in  the  imagination  of 
Israel. 

These  were  the  first  words  he  spoke  as  he 
bursts  on  our  view.  What  lay  behind  them  we 
can  only  surmise.  He  was  a  Tishbite,  one  "  of 
the  sojourners  of  Gilead,"  dwelling  beyond  the 
Jordan,  a  man  brought  up  in  the  desert.  There 
on  the  level  sands,  with  the  eye  of  God  looking 
down  upon  him,  he  had  come  to  a  deep  feeling 
of  the  soul's  lonely  stand  before  God,  and  con- 
vinced of  God  and  the  righteousness  of  God  he 
came  over  the  Jordan  to  speak  his  message  and 
do  his  work  in  the  organized  national  life  of  his 
people.  He  was  a  clean-limbed,  frugal-lived 
man,  who  gathered  up  his  skirts  about  him, 
we  are  told,  and  ran  straight  away  sixteen  miles 
before  the  chariot  of  Ahab,  from  Carmel  to  the 
entering  in  of  Jezreel ;  a  calm,  quiet,  courageous, 
firm-principled  man ;  bred  so  in  the  desert  with 
God. 

We  do  not  have  any  very  elaborate  story  of 
his  life.  He  appears  on  the  stage  and  then  he 
vanishes.  There  are  long  periods  of  time  cover- 
ing years  when  he  disappears  entirely  from  the 
record.  We  can  condense  what  we  know  about 
his  life  into  six  brief  chapters,  between  each  two 
of  which  there  is  an  interval,  in  some  cases,  a 
long  interval  of  time. 

He  appears  first  of  all  in  connection  with  the 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY       147 

great  drought  which  he  prophesied  and  which 
lasted  for  the  three  years  he  had  foretold.     We 
see  him  by  the  little  brook  Cherith,  fed  of  the 
ravens,  until  through  the  long  cessation  of  the 
rain  the  brook  itself  disappeared.     Then  we  see 
him  in  the  house  of  the  widow  of  Sarepta,  feed- 
ing with  her  on  her  little  supply  of  meal,  and  in 
her   hour  of  depthless  sorrow  raising  her  son 
from   death  to   life.     And   then,  in   the  second 
chapter,  he   breaks   forth  once   more  upon  the 
national   stage.     Ahab  and   Obadiah,  his  chief 
maiip   had   sought   for   him   up   and   down  the 
land,  having  divided  the  country  between  them, 
partly  that  they  might  seek  water  for  their  fast 
diminishing  herds,  partly  that  they  might  meet 
again  and   punish  this   troubler   of   Israel.     At 
last,  on  one  of  the  highways,  the  man  of  God 
appeared  to  the  prime  minister  and  told  him  that 
he  had  no  fear  to  meet  the  king  and  would  do 
so  if  he  would  carry  word  to  Ahab.     True  to  his 
word,  he  met  the  king,  confronted  him  with  his 
disloyalty  to  Jehovah,  and   challenged  him  to 
produce  the  prophets  of  Baal  for  the  great  test 
on  Mount  Carmel ;  and  then,  after  his  triumph, 
Elijah  again  disappears. 

In  the  third  chapter  we  have  the  only  account 
of  the  man's  inner  life.  If  it  were  not  for  that 
chapter  with  its  story  of  his  subjective  struggle, 
Elijah  would  be  no  example  for  us  men  of  this 
day.     In  all  the  other  chapters  of  the  story  he 


148  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

appears  absolutely  undaunted,  unafraid  of  the 
face  of  man,  clearly  convinced  of  what  God 
would  have  him  do,  and  absolutely  fearless  in 
the  doing  of  it.  But  here  we  are  shown  the  man  in 
his  own  inward  wavering,  in  doubt  in  some  meas- 
ure about  the  reality  or  power  of  his  mission, 
afraid  to  carry  forward  that  which  he  had  set  out 
to  do  with  such  daring  spirit ;  and  in  the  wilder- 
ness alone,  first  beneath  the  juniper  tree  and  then 
on  Mount  Horeb,  Elijah  had  to  face  again  his 
life  and  settle  himself  once  more  in  that  faith  in 
the  living  God  which  had  brought  him  out  of  the 
desert.  And  God  stood  out  and  spoke  to  him, 
and  Elijah  rose  up  on  his  feet  once  more  a  man 
unafraid  to  resume  his  mission.  God  bade  him 
return  and  anoint  a  new  king  over  Syria  and  a 
new  king  over  Israel,  and  to  go  to  Abel-meholah 
and  find  his  own  successor,  the  young  man  Elisha, 
plowing  behind  his  oxen.  And  the  prophet  went 
out  from  his  hour  of  discouragement  to  find  at 
once  the  young  man  who  was  to  take  up  his 
work  after  him  and  to  be  an  even  mightier 
prophet  than  he. 

Then  for  a  long  time  Elijah  disappears  again, 
only  to  reappear  when  he  confronts  Ahab  once 
more,  in  Naboth's  vineyard,  shows  him  how  little 
he  fears  him,  and  pronounces  upon  him  the 
judgment  of  Jehovah.  Then  he  vanishes  from 
the  stage  for  three  years  at  least  of  solitary 
meditation  in  the  wilderness,  vanishes  so  long 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY       149 

that  the  common  people  apparently  forgot  him, 
so  that  when  one  day  he  met  a  little  party  of  the 
servants  of  the  new  king  Ahaziah  on  the  high- 
way bound  to  Ekron  to  consult  Baal-zebub,  they 
did  not  know  who  the  prophet  was  and  brought 
back  his  message  to  the  king,  able  only  to  say 
of  him  that  he  was  a  hairy  man,  with  a  leather 
girdle  about  his  loins.  But  the  king  well  knew 
that  the  Tishbite  had  broken  once  more  upon 
the  stage  of  the  nation's  life,  and  he  bowed  be- 
neath the  judgments  of  God  that  the  man  from 
Gilead  denounced. 

Then  in  the  concluding  chapter  we  see  Elijah 
and  his  young  man  coming  down  from  Gilgal 
to  Bethel  and  then  to  Jericho  and  then  back  to 
the  wilderness  out  of  which  he  had  come,  that 
from  his  own  deserts  where  he  had  come  to 
know  God  he  might  go  back  to  God  again.  And 
there  in  the  chariot  of  fire  the  man  who  was 
himself  *'  the  chariots  of  Israel,  and  the  horsemen 
thereof,"  went  up  to  the  Lord  God  of  Israel, 
Who  was  alive,  to  meet  Him  before  Whom  he 
had  always  stood. 

One  does  not  wonder  that  the  old  man  im- 
pressed as  he  did  the  imagination  of  his  people, 
and  that  when  centuries  later  John  the  Baptist 
emerged  upon  the  stage  challenging  the  atten- 
tion of  the  nation,  almost  the  first  question  ad- 
dressed to  him  was,  "  Art  thou  Elijah  ?  " 

And  we  have  the  secret  of  Elijah's  life  given 


150  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

to  us  in  these  words  with  which  he  is  introduced 
to  us,  "  As  the  Lord  God  of  Israel  liveth,  before 
whom  I  stand."  Out  there  in  the  barrenness  of 
the  desert  beyond  the  Jordan,  Elijah  had  come 
to  believe  in  a  God  Who  was  alive,  and  before 
Whom  he  lived  his  life.  The  deserts  have  never 
bred  polytheism.  The  great  polytheistic  systems 
have  sprung  from  the  lush  jungles  of  the  tropics. 
The  great  monotheisms  have  been  born  in  the 
deserts.  And  out  on  the  lonely  sands  beyond 
the  Jordan,  beyond  the  hills  and  amid  the  great 
level  places  where  there  was  no  one  but  God, 
Elijah  came  to  know  that  He  was  and  to  know 
that  his  life  stood  in  Him. 

This  was  the  principle  of  the  man's  life — the 
consuming  conviction  of  a  living  God  and  of  the 
commission  of  His  uncompromising  service.  In- 
deed we  are  not  sure  that  we  know  Elijah's 
name.  It  is  possible  that  the  name  by  which  we 
think  we  know  him  is  only  a  pseudonym — Elijah, 
"  My  God  is  Jehovah."  It  may  be  that  from  the 
very  repetition  of  this  phrase  to  which  he  was 
addicted,  "The  Lord  God  of  Israel,  before 
whom  I  stand,"  men  came  at  last  to  call  him  by 
the  opening  note  of  his  message,  "  the  man  of 
the  living  God." 

Now  what  that  message  meant  to  Elijah  was 
just  this  :  that  the  Lord  God  was  no  dead  force, 
no  unknown  cause  of  things,  that  the  Lord  God 
was  alive,  and  that  a  man  was  to  have  dealings 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY       151 

with  Him  ;  that  a  man's  life  was  not  his  own 
personal  and  irresponsible  experiment,  but  a 
work  to  be  done  in  front  of  God  ;  and  that  a  man 
must  reckon  in  all  his  thoughts,  in  all  his  ways, 
with  One  Who  lives,  and  go  out  and  do  his  work 
in  the  world  in  the  consciousness  of  his  relation- 
ship and  his  subjection  to  an  active,  working, 
personal  God  Who  would  stand  by  him  in  the 
fire,  would  uphold  him  before  kings,  and  carry 
him  through  to  the  end  of  each  of  his  appointed 
tasks.  If  there  is  one  thing  that  we  need  to  get 
clearly  fixed  in  our  own  lives  it  is  the  matter  of 
our  attitude  towards  this  infinite  and  unseen  God 
Who  is  alive. 

This  faith  in  a  God  Who  is  alive,  before 
Whose  face  a  man  is  to  live  his  life,  is  no  mere 
theory.  You  cannot  find  any  conviction  that 
will  more  really  mould  and  transform  all  our 
conduct  and  put  uncompromising  stiffness  in  it 
than  the  conviction  that  we  are  living  our  lives 
thus  before  the  eyes  of  a  God  Who  observes. 
In  the  life  of  Thring  of  Uppingham  we  are  told 
of  an  incident  that  pleased  him  greatly.  It  is  a 
story  that  came  to  him  regarding  a  little  group 
of  boys  who  were  spending  the  summer  in 
France.  A  visitor  saw  these  English  schoolboys 
and  overheard  their  conversation  as  to  what  they 
should  do  on  Sunday.  Some  of  the  boys  were 
proposing  a  certain  course  of  action,  and  all 
seemed  to  agree  until  one  fellow  spoke  up  and 


153  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

said :  "No,  I  do  not  agree.  I  will  not  do  it."  And 
when  the  other  lads  urged  him  to  come  along, 
he  still  insisted  that  he  would  not.  They  asked 
him  his  reasons.  He  said  :  "  Well,  Thring  would 
not  like  it,  and  what  Thring  would  not  like  I  do 
not  intend  to  do."  "Well,  but  Thring  isn't 
here,"  they  said ;  "  he's  back  at  Uppingham." 
"  I  do  not  care,"  said  the  boy  ;  "  Thring  would 
not  like  it."  He  believed  that  he  was  living  in 
a  real  sense — I  mean  in  the  most  real  sense  of 
all,  in  the  life  of  his  personal  will — before  the 
standards  of  his  master,  and  by  those  standards 
as  in  the  light  of  his  master's  countenance  he  in- 
sisted that  he  would  uncompromisingly  live. 
Before  the  eyes  of  God  a  man  will  beware  how 
he  lives  his  life.  If  he  knows  that  this  life  of  his 
can  find  no  darkness  where  he  can  hide  himself 
from  God,  if  he  knows  that  all  of  his  days  are  to 
be  spent  before  His  face,  that  all  his  deeds  are  to 
be  done  beneath  the  gaze  of  God,  assuredly 
that  will  govern  and  control  a  man's  decisions 
about  his  practical  ways.  The  consciousness  of 
a  living  God  will  give  direction  to  a  man's  moral 
life. 

And  it  will  not  only  give  direction.  There  is 
many  a  man  among  us  who  knows  that  the  con- 
sciousness of  a  God  Who  is  alive  not  only  gives 
determination  and  direction  to  his  ways,  but  puts 
a  new  power  and  inspiration  in  them. 

A  friend   in   New  York   tells   a  lovely  story 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY        153 

about  a  boy  in  one  of  the  great  English  schools. 
He  was  an  only  child,  and  his  mother  died  when 
he  was  but  a  little  fellow.  Between  him  and  his 
father  there  grew  up  relations  of  the  most  deli- 
cate and  sensitive  intimacy.  The  father  was 
blind,  so  that  the  little  boy  had  to  be  his  father's 
eyes,  and  until  the  day  came  when  the  lad  had 
to  go  away  to  school  there  was  scarcely  an  hour 
when  the  two  were  separated.  But  at  last  the 
time  came  and  the  boy  went.  He  became  the 
best  athlete  in  his  school.  One  spring,  just  be- 
fore the  final  game  in  which  the  boy  was  to  bowl 
for  his  own  school,  tidings  came  that  his  father 
was  seriously  ill  and  he  must  come  home.  The 
news  sent  the  whole  school  into  lamentation,  for 
they  were  afraid  that  he  might  not  recover  and 
that  if  he  did  not  the  boy  could  not  play  in  the 
concluding  and  critical  game.  And  indeed,  as 
it  turned  out,  the  father  died.  The  day  before 
the  game  was  to  be  played  the  boy  came  back 
to  school,  and,  to  the  amazement  of  all,  let  it  be 
known  that  he  intended  to  play.  The  next  day 
he  took  his  place  and  played  as  he  had  never 
played  in  his  life  before.  When  at  last  the  game 
was  over  and  the  school  had  won  its  triumph, 
one  of  the  masters  came  to  the  boy  and  ex- 
pressed to  him  the  delighted  surprise  of  the 
school  at  what  he  had  done  and  their  amaze- 
ment both  that  he  had  played  at  all  and  at  the 
way   he   had    played.     "Why,"   said   the   boy, 


154  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

"didn't  you  understand?  I  wouldn't  have 
missed  it  for  anything.  That  was  the  first  game 
my  father  ever  saw  me  play."  Beneath  the  con- 
sciousness that  for  the  first  time  his  father's  eyes 
were  open  and  watching  him  the  boy  had  dis- 
covered capacities  of  power  that  he  hardly  knew 
he  possessed  before.  Beneath  the  eye  of  our 
Father,  Who  is  looking  upon  the  game  that  we 
are  playing,  where  is  the  man  that  cannot  play 
a  better  game,  who  cannot  draw  on  the  reser- 
voirs of  power  untouched  before,  who  cannot 
come  out  and  do  his  work  in  the  world  and  live 
his  life  with  larger  inspiration  and  strength,  with 
more  dominion  and  sovereignty,  because  he  is 
living  it  before  a  God  Who  is  alive  ?  To  such 
a  man  will  compromise  not  seem  a  filial  insult 
impossible  except  by  a  base  degradation  of  the 
soul? 

And  not  only  did  Elijah's  principle  determine 
his  conduct  and  pour  inspiration  into  it ;  it  was 
this  principle  of  a  God  Who  is  alive  that  made 
him  absolutely  fearless.  He  was  not  only  un- 
afraid of  physical  harm,  but  he  had  none  of  that 
subtler  fear  that  every  man  knows — the  fear  that 
he  himself  will  fail,  the  fear  that  he  cannot  carry 
himself  safely  through.  What  you  and  I  are 
afraid  of  is  not  the  things  that  are  without ;  our 
enemy  is  inside.  Treachery  within  the  walls  is 
all  that  we  need  to  dread,  and  our  deepest  fear 
is  of  our  own  failure.     That  was  the  great  thing 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY       155 

in  Elijah's  life,  that  he  dared  to  stand  on  Mount 
Carmel,  before  all  that  crowd  of  priests,  confident 
and  fearless.  He  knew  he  would  prevail,  that  he 
had  not  promised  in  vain  that  God  would  an- 
swer. The  man  who  knows  that  he  is  living  his 
life  before  a  God  Who  is  alive  and  doing  his 
work  in  the  name  of  a  God  Who  is  alive  is  not 
afraid  either  of  what  men  can  do  to  him  or  of  the 
failure  that  he  may  make  himself. 

There  is  a  story  in  the  life  of  Dr.  Schauffler 
that  illustrates  how  to-day  too  men  can  rise  into 
just  such  fearlessness.  The  missionaries  were 
being  bothered  a  great  deal  in  Constantinople 
by  Russian  machinations  against  the  Protestant 
missions  in  the  empire,  and  Dr.  Schauffler  went 
to  see  the  Russian  ambassador.  "  1  might  as 
well  tell  you  now,  Mr.  Schauffler,"  said  the  am- 
bassador, "  that  the  Emperor  of  Russia,  who  is 
my  master,  will  never  allow  Protestantism  to  set 
its  foot  in  Turkey."  The  old  missionary  looked 
at  him  for  a  moment  and  then  replied  :  "  Your 
Excellency,  the  kingdom  of  Christ,  who  is  my 
Master,  w  11  never  ask  the  Emperor  of  all  the 
Russias  where  it  may  set  its  foot."  And  he 
went  on  \  'ith  his  mission  unintimidated  by  any 
agencies  working  in  the  dark  against  him,  be- 
cause he  was  confident  that  the  living  God 
Whose  work  he  was  doing  would  achieve  for 
him  His  own  victory. 

And  we  see  in  this  story  of  Elijah  another 

_/ 


156  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

thing  that  this  great  conviction  will  do  for  a 
man  :  it  will  make  a  troubler  of  him.  "  Art  thou 
he,"  said  Ahab  when  he  met  Elijah  in  the  midst 
of  the  great  famine,  "  art  thou  he  that  troubleth 
Israel  ?  "  "  No,"  said  Elijah  ;  "  thou  art  he  who 
troubles  Israel."  And  yet  they  were  both  troub- 
ling Israel,  the  one  with  the  iniquities  into  which 
he  was  leading  the  people,  the  other  because  the 
principle  of  the  living  God  dominating  his  life 
drove  him  as  a  great  moral  force  against  the 
evils  of  his  time.  A  man  cannot  live  in  a  col- 
lege or  university  with  a  faith  that  God  is  living 
and  that  he  himself  is  living  in  front  of  God,  and 
be  quiet  before  the  moral  iniquities  and  evils  he 
will  find.  It  is  not  enough  for  a  man  to  say,  "  I 
will  simply  be  myself,  live  my  own  clean  life,  and 
let  my  silent  influence  count."  If  his  silent  in- 
fluence does  not  count,  no  other  influence  of  his 
will  count.  But  the  silence  is  not  enough.  A 
little  while  ago  I  copied  from  one  of  the  letters 
of  Mandel  Creighton,  late  Bishop  of  London, 
written  to  his  boys  who  were  away  at  school, 
this  bit  of  advice.  "  You  will  see,  then,"  he 
writes  to  one  son,  who  had  just  been  made  a 
monitor  in  his  school,  "  you  will  see,  then,  that 
the  chief  influence  of  a  monitor  is  in  his  example. 
But  this  is  the  point  on  which  I  have  seen  many 
people  deceive  themselves.  They  trust  to  what 
they  call  the  force  of  silent  example.  That  is 
most  pernicious.     If  you  content  yourself  with 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY       157 

merely  keeping  school  rules  and  doing  what  is 
right  yourself  and  keeping  out  of  the  way  of  any 
fellows  who  you  know  are  doing  wrong,  or  if 
you  stand  by  and  listen  to  them  saying  what 
they  ought  not,  without  reproof,  you  are  doing 
wrong.  No,  that  won't  do.  It  is  part  of  the  es- 
sence of  good  to  fight  against  evil.  You  must 
set  your  face  strongly  against  all  that  is  bad,  and 
must  put  down  not  only  all  that  you  find  in  the 
course  of  your  walk,  but  you  must  go  out  of 
your  walk  to  find  it  in  order  to  put  it  down." 

There  has  been  much  complaint  these  last 
years  because  in  high  places  in  this  land  there 
have  been  men  who  were  troublers  of  the  nation. 
The  great  need  of  the  nation  has  been  men  who 
were  prepared  to  make  trouble  in  order  that, 
at  last,  righteousness  might  come.  Things  that 
have  thought  themselves  secure  will  be  shaken ; 
long  vested  interests  that  have  believed  them- 
selves to  be  sacred  will  have  their  sanctity  scruti- 
nized ;  and  men  will  come  at  last  into  their  rights 
and  their  righteousness,  if  we  are  prepared,  fol- 
lowing the  old  Tishbite,  to  live  our  lives  before 
the  God  Who  is  alive. 

And  this  same  principle  brings  peace  and 
quiet  and  tranquillity  to  men.  Elijah  shook 
once,  we  know,  but  only  once.  Every  time  we 
see  him  on  the  public  stage,  no  matter  whom  he 
is  confronting — Jezebel,  Ahab,  Obadiah,  Ahaziah 
— he  is  standing  with  confident  soul,  quiet  and 


158  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

still.  We  can  be  sure  that  if  on  that  day  at 
Mount  Carmel  we  could  have  first  mingled  with 
those  four  hundred  and  fifty  priests  of  Baal  who 
knew  that  their  day  of  doom  had  come,  and  then 
have  gone  over  and  stood  by  the  side  of  the  old 
man,  we  should  have  found  the  old  man  the  most 
quiet  and  placid  person  on  the  mountainside 
and  his  heart  beat  the  calmest.  And  we  may  be 
sure  that  we  can  go  in  the  same  tranquillity  and 
calm  and  steadfastness  in  which  the  old  Tishbite 
lived,  if  we  will  believe  as  deeply  as  he  did  in  a 
Lord  God  Who  is  alive,  and  will  live  our  lives 
before  His  face  with  as  little  compromise  and 
fear. 

And  it  is  a  great  conviction  like  this  of  Elijah's 
that  steadies  men  in  the  hour  of  their  trial  and 
that  when  they  fall  redeems  them  again.  The 
old  prophet  fell  down.  He  ran  from  a  woman's 
threats,  and  beneath  the  juniper  tree  and  then  on 
Horeb,  he  shook  and  was  afraid.  But  God,  Who 
was  alive  before,  was  alive  still,  and  He  came  to 
Mount  Horeb,  where  the  man  lay  in  his  spiritual 
petulance  and  fear,  and  He  was  not  in  the  great 
wind,  and  He  was  not  in  the  great  earthquake, 
and  He  was  not  in  the  great  fire,  but  at  last  in 
the  still  small  voice  of  life  He  spoke  to  Elijah, 
and  Elijah  rose  up  on  his  feet  once  more  and 
went  out  to  complete  his  work  in  unfaltering 
triumph. 

It  works  that  way  still.     There  is  a  letter  of 


THE  JOY  OF  THE  MINORITY       159 

Abraham  Lincoln,  the  original  of  which  is  pre- 
served in  the  state  capitol  at  Albany.  It  is  a  let- 
ter Lincoln  wrote  granting  a  pardon  to  a  deserter. 

Executive  Mansion, 

Washington,  October  4,  1864. 
Upon  condition  that  Roswell  Mclntyre  of  Company  E, 
Sixth  Regiment  of  New  York  Cavalry,  returns  to  his  regi- 
ment and  faithfully  serves  out  his  term,  making  up  for  lost 
time,  or  until  otherwise  lawfully  discharged,  he  is  fully 
pardoned  for  any  supposed  desertion  heretofore  committed ; 
and  this  paper  is  his  pass  to  go  to  his  regiment. 

Abraham  Lincoln. 

On  the  side  of  it  is  indorsed :  "  Quartermas- 
ter's Office,  New  York  City,  October  22,  1864. 
Transportation  furnished  to  Baltimore,  Mary- 
land. H.  Brownson "  ;  and  at  the  bottom  in  a 
different  hand  is  this  indorsement :  "  Taken  from 
the  body  of  R.  Mclntyre  at  the  Battle  of  Five 
Forks,  Virginia,  1865."  So  he  went  back  and 
died  like  a  man,  with  his  pardon  on  his  person. 
And  to-day,  to  the  coward  and  the  deserter  and 
the  traitor,  the  man  who  has  compromised  and 
the  man  who  has  run  away,  the  same  Lord  God 
Who  set  Elijah  on  his  feet  is  speaking,  and  He 
is  able  to  send  him  back  to  be  faithful,  even  unto 
death.  Thanks  be  to  a  God  Who  does  not  com- 
promise and  Who  is  still  alive. 


LECTURE  V 
THE  LIFE  INVISIBLE 

IT  is  interesting  to  note  two  contrary  tenden- 
cies in  tiie  current  appraisal  of  spiritual 
values  in  America.  On  the  one  hand  there 
is  what  has  been  called,  not  altogether  happily, 
the  tendency  of  ethical  materialism.  In  its  best 
form  it  is  simply  a  demand  for  reality,  the  re- 
newal of  the  old  words,  "  By  their  fruits  ye 
shall  know  them."  "  Show  me  thy  faith  by  thy 
works."  In  its  less  worthy  forms  it  is  the  effort 
to  eliminate  spiritual  expression  and  formal  re- 
ligion from  areas  of  life  where  these  have  been 
most  familiar.  Illustrations  in  extreme  forms 
abound. 

We  are  told  now  that  in  charity  love  has 
1  othing  to  do  with  the  matter,  that  the  intro- 
duction of  religious  sentiment  is  only  mischie- 
vous and  misleading,  that  the  issue  is  one  purely 
of  proper  economic  principle  and  organization. 
It  is  a  question  of  employment  for  the  unem- 
ployed, or  of  calculating  accurately  the  amount 
of  need,  counting  the  hungry  mouths  and  fixing 
the  quantity  of  bread,  and  then  determining 
scientifically  how  much  of  the  bread  the  hungry 
should    earn,   and   how   much   society   through 

160 


THE  LIFE  INVISIBLE  161 

appropriate  and  unsentimental  machinery  should 
supply. 

In  medical  philanthropy  the  new  idea  is  that 
ideas  have  nothing  to  do  with  it.  The  good 
Samaritan,  we  are  told,  did  not  give  the  wounded 
man  a  tract  or  say  anything  to  him  about  the 
religious  views  or  motives  of  his  benefactor.  He 
was  satisfied  to  heal  his  skin  and  stop  at  that. 
Let  the  chaplains  depart  from  the  hospitals. 

And  so  also  in  social  service.  The  legitimate 
work  is  to  improve  the  culinary  methods  of  the 
neighbourhood,  to  provide  innocent  games  and 
sports,  to  secure  more  adequate  food  supplies  for 
living  bodies  and  to  assist  in  the  burial  of  dead 
ones  ;  but  Christ  must  not  be  mentioned,  and  re- 
ligious issues  must  not  be  raised. 

These  are  extreme  illustrations,  but  they  are 
perfectly  familiar,  and  the  tendency  they  repre- 
sent is  indisputable.  In  this  view  our  Lord,  of 
course,  was  far  astray  when  He  talked  to  His 
disciples  by  Jacob's  well  about  having  meat  to 
eat  which  they  knew  not.  "  Meat  1 "  say  our 
modern  ethical  materialists.  *'  Meat  is  meat — 
beef  or  bread.  It  is  not  a  metaphor.  Meat  that 
is  a  metaphor  is  a  mockery."  Well,  it  would  be 
if  it  were  offered  for  food  to  a  hungry  man,  but 
it  is  not  a  mockery  to  the  man  who  would  go 
hungry  to  feed  the  hungry.  And  the  whole 
modern  question  is  not  between  those  who 
would  give  real  meat  to  the  hungry  and  those 


162  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

who  would  give  only  metaphorical  meat.  It  is  be- 
tween those  who  want  to  deal  with  people's  skins 
only  and  those  who  mean  to  deal  both  with  their 
skins  and  with  their  souls,  between  those  who 
conceive  of  man  as  mainly  belly  and  back  and 
those  to  whom  our  real  life  is  the  life  invisible. 

It  is  a  very  curious  phenomenon,  this  exclusion 
of  Christian  ideas  from  the  very  area  which  they 
created.  For  all  this  charity  and  philanthropy 
and  social  service  were  produced  by  the  ideas  of 
Christianity.  And  now  the  fruit  says  to  the  vine 
and  to  the  inward  life,  "  I  have  no  need  of  thee." 
Of  course  not  all  the  fruit  says  this.  Some  of  it 
only  says,  "  Vine  and  inward  life,  there  is  a  preju- 
dice against  you.  You  would  do  well  to  conceal 
yourself.  I  will  pretend  to  be  the  real  thing." 
But  some  of  the  fruit  has  gone  further.  "  I  am 
the  real  thing,"  it  says.  "  I  know  more  than 
James.  Faith  must  not  only  show  works  :  works 
are  faith.  There  is  no  need  of  metaphysics  or 
creeds.  Deeds  are  religion.  The  only  wealth 
is  tangible  wealth,  things  handled,  works  seen, 
bread  out  of  the  ground,  not  down  from  heaven. 
Meat  that  the  disciples  could  not  see  is  too 
pallid  for  this  earth.  Man  is  his  skin  and  the 
bag  which  it  contains,  and  religion  must  under- 
stand this." 

At  the  same  time  that  this  suicidal  tendency  is 
operating  in  the  field  of  man's  highest  values 
seeking  to  destroy  his  standards  and  to  discredit 


THE  LIFE  INVISIBLE  163 

the  title-deeds  of  all  his  greatest  treasures,  a  pre- 
cisely contrary  tendency  is  acting  in  commerce 
and  politics,  in  the  field  of  man's  lower  values. 
While  men  are  busy  on  the  one  hand  in  the  effort 
to  materialize  the  spiritual  wealth  which  Christi- 
anity has  produced,  other  men  are  seeking  with 
a  new  earnestness  to  spiritualize  our  material 
wealth.  As  education,  science,  philanthropy, 
surrenders  the  spiritual  vision  and  ideal,  trade 
and  politics  clutch  after  it.  Never  before  in  the 
history  of  the  world  has  there  been  such  an  effort 
as  there  is  to-day  to  idealize  nationalism,  to  build 
up  spiritual  conceptions  behind  the  State,  to 
make  racial  feeling  a  religion.  If  some  men 
think  that  religious  values  and  spiritual  ideas 
and  so-called  "  metaphysical "  notions  can  be 
spared  from  charity  and  social  service,  other 
men  are  striving  with  all  their  might  to  secure 
all  this  rejected  mass  of  vitality  and  power  for 
patriotism  and  the  national  life. 

And  the  same  spiritualizing  and  idealizing 
tendency  is  even  more  evident  in  commerce  and 
finance.  Wealth  becomes  less  and  less  material. 
In  primitive  times  riches  consisted  in  flocks  and 
herds  and  land  and  in  actual  gold  and  silver 
bullion  or  coins  which  their  owner  put  in  a  crock 
and  buried  in  his  house.  Now  wealth  consists 
in  credit  and  securities,  in  figures  written  on  a 
ledger  in  a  bank,  or  in  scraps  of  paper  in  a  tin 
box.     The  world's  work  is  done  with  little  visible 


164  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

wealth.  Our  new  banking  system  is  meant  for 
this  very  purpose,  to  provide  immaterial  instru- 
mentalities. Millions  of  dollars  are  transported 
invisibly.  By  a  cable  message  or  a  message 
through  the  air  untold  wealth  that  was  in  London 
can  be  made  to  appear  in  New  York.  And  all 
these  intangible  forms  of  wealth  are  exceeded  in 
the  judgment  of  the  late  Mr.  J.  P.  Morgan  by  the 
credit  of  character,  something  still  more  "  meta- 
physical." The  spiritualization  of  the  material 
keeps  pace  on  one  side  with  the  materialization 
of  the  spiritual  on  the  other. 

However  clear  or  foggy  our  ideas  on  these 
issues  may  be  now,  viewing  them  as  present 
issues,  we  cannot  fail  to  see  sharply  the  indis- 
putable facts  of  the  past.  Looking  backward 
we  simply  do  not  discern  and  cannot  remember 
the  visible  and  outward  values  or  possessors  of 
values  at  all.  Where  is  the  actual  material 
wealth  of  earlier  days,  the  flocks,  the  gold  and 
silver,  the  palaces  ?  The  amazing  thing  is  that 
it  is  all  gone.  The  gold  and  silver  which  Rome 
gathered  from  the  world,  which  went  home  to 
Spain  in  the  days  of  the  Conquistadores,  where  is 
it  all  now  ?  Where  are  those  who  boasted  it  and 
built  their  fame  or  power  on  it  ?  Shelley  tells  us 
in  his  sonnet,  '*  Ozymandias," 

**  I  met  a  traveller  from  an  antique  land 

Who  said,  '  Two  vast  and  trunkless  legs  of  stone 
Stand  in  the  desert.     Near  them,  on  the  sand 


THE  LIFE  INVISIBLE  165 

Half  sunk,  a  shattered  visage  lies,  whose  frown 
And  wrinkled  lip,  and  sneer  of  cold  command 
Tell  that  its  sculptor  well  those  passions  read 
Which  yet  survive,  stamped  on  those  lifeless  things, 
The  hand  that  mocked  them  and  th«  heart  that  fed : 
And  on  the  pedestal  these  words  appear : 
••  My  name  is  Ozymandias,  king  of  kings, 
Look  on  my  works,  ye  Mighty,  and  despair  !  '* 
Nothing  beside  remains.     Round  the  decay 
Of  that  colossal  wreck,  boundless  and  bare, 
The  lone  and  level  sands  stretch  far  away.'  " 

And  what  befell  Ozymandias'  image  has  befallen 
almost  all  the  works  of  the  ancients'  hands.  A 
few  of  their  temples  remain,  and  the  arches  of 
their  viaducts  and  some  of  the  images  of  their 
public  worship  and  of  their  national  ideals.  But 
their  wealth  and  the  treasure  houses  which  they 
kept  it  in  and  the  palaces  of  their  pleasure  and 
the  cities  of  their  pride  are  gone.  I  never 
felt  more  keenly  the  tragedy  and  the  truth  of 
this  utter  transitoriness  and  insecurity  of  all  na- 
tional glory  than  looking  over  the  massive  ruins 
of  the  palace  of  the  Chosroes  kings  at  Kasr-i- 
Shirin.  All  of  Browning's  "Love  Among  the 
Ruins"  seemed  to  be  there  in  mute  evidence 
before  one's  eyes : 

**  Where  the  quiet-coloured  end  of  evening  smiles 

Miles  and  miles 
On  the  solitary  pastures  where  our  sheep 

Half-asleep 
Tinkle  homeward  through  the  twilight,  stray  or  stop 

As  they  crop  — 


166  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

Was  the  site  once  of  a  city  great  and  gay, 

(So  they  say) 
Of  our  country's  very  capital,  its  prince 

Ages  since 
Held  his  court  in,  gathered  councils,  wielding  far 

Peace  or  war. 

**  Now, — the  country  does  not  even  boast  a  tree. 

As  you  see, 
To  distinguish  slopes  of  verdure,  certain  rills 

From  the  hills 
Intersect  and  give  a  name  to,  (else  they  run 

Into  one,) 
Where  the  domed  and  daring  palace  shot  its  spires 

Up  like  fires 
O'er  the  hundred-gated  circuit  of  a  wall 

Bounding  all. 
Made  of  marble,  men  might  march  on  nor  be  pressed, 

Twelve  abreast. 

**  And  such  plenty  and  perfection,  see,  of  grass 

Never  was ! 
Such  a  carpet  as,  this  summer-time,  o'erspreads 

And  embeds 
Every  vestige  of  the  city,  guessed  alone, 

Stock  or  stone  — 
Where  a  multitude  of  men  breathed  joy  and  woe 

Long  ago ; 
Lust  of  glory  pricked  their  hearts  up,  dread  of  shame 

Struck  them  tame ; 
And  that  glory  and  that  shame  alike,  the  gold 

Bought  and  sold. 

"  Now, — the  single  little  turret  that  remains 

On  the  plains, 
By  the  caper  overrooted,  by  the  gourd 

Overscored, 
While  the  patching  houseleek's  head  of  blossom  winks 

Through  the  chinks  — 
Marks  the  basement  whence  a  tower  in  ancient  time 

Sprang  sublime. 


THE  LIFE  INVISIBLE  167 

And  a  burning  ring,  all  round,  the  chariots  traced 

As  they  raced, 
And  the  monarch  and  his  minions  and  his  dames 

Viewed  the  games." 

All  this  is  gone.  The  only  wealth  of  the  past 
which  has  survived  is  such  as  Christ  referred  to. 
"  I  have  meat  to  eat  that  ye  know  not  of."  The 
ideas  and  the  literature  which  enshrined  them 
alone  remain.  Not  the  manuscripts.  They  are 
gone,  as  though  God  would  show  in  the  most 
vivid  way  His  scorn  of  the  visible  and  earth's 
"  real."  Not  one  original  page  of  Plato  exists. 
But  Plato's  mind  is  here  still.  The  kings  are 
gone.  But  Isaiah  and  Jeremiah,  the  men  of  the 
inward  resources,  spokesmen  and  ministers  of  the 
invisible  life,  abide. 

«'  The  tumult  and  the  shouting  dies 
The  captains  and  the  kings  depart 
Still  stands  Thine  against  sacrifice 
A  humble  and  a  contrite  heart." 

And  the  issue  is  clear  enough  when  we  look  at 
it  concretely  to-day  and  contrast  the  men  who 
have  the  inward  resources  with  those  who  have 
not,  the  movements  which  are  fed  from  deep 
ideal  springs  with  those  which  deal  skin-deep 
only  with  humanity.  In  one  of  our  American 
cities  the  president  of  a  large  institution  was 
shelved  in  the  prime  of  life  by  younger  and  less 
conservative  men  who  acquired  control  of  the 
business.     They  treated  the  older  man  well,  gave 


168  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

him  the  nominal  headship  with  his  former  salary, 
but  really  transferred  all  the  power  to  other  men. 
It  was  the  chance  of  a  lifetime  for  the  older  man. 
He  had  his  strength  and  his  time  for  any  service 
or  ministry  or  pleasure  he  might  choose.  But 
the  only  meat  which  he  had  to  eat  was  the  man- 
agement of  the  business,  and  accordingly  he 
starved  to  death  in  a  fine  home  and  with  a  large 
salary.  All  that  the  bag  of  his  body  needed  he 
had,  but  man  cannot  live  by  bread  alone  with- 
out a  word  from  God.  The  Tinker  of  Bedford 
Jail  heard  the  key  turn  in  the  lock  behind  him. 
And  did  he  famish  alone  ?  He  opened  the  gate 
of  his  house  within  and  out  they  came — Christian 
and  Great-Heart  and  Hopeful  and  Evangelist 
and  Mercy  and  Dare-to-Die — and  the  loneliness 
of  John  Bunyan's  cell  became  the  greatest  society 
on  earth,  and  the  immortals  who  marched  out  of 
the  wealth  of  his  soul  are  the  companions  of 
millions  who  could  not  name  one  human  being 
who  was  Bunyan's  contemporary.  The  rich  men 
who  have  transmitted  real  wealth  have  been  the 
lovers,  the  dreamers,  the  servers  who  ate  bread 
at  God's  hands  and  who  knew  and  taught  men 
that  the  life  is  more  than  meat  and  the  body  than 
raiment.  "She  was  not  daily  bread,"  wrote  her 
niece  of  Emily  Dickinson.  "  She  was  star  dust." 
This  above  all  was  characteristic  of  Christ.  Part 
of  our  Lord's  preeminence  of  nature  and  of 
achievement  was  the  untold  wealth  of  His  inward 


THE  LIFE  INVISIBLE  169 

resources.  No  philanthropist  or  social  worker 
ever  lived  who  was  His  equal  in  all  that  our  eth- 
ical materialists  admire  and  praise.  But  behind 
all  this  and  as  explaining  all  this  He  had  meat  to 
eat  that  men  knew  not,  thoughts  of  God,  ideas  of 
origin  and  destiny,  of  whence  He  came  and 
whither  He  was  going,  fellowship,  purposes,  a 
spiritual  program.  His  wealth  was  an  inward,  a 
communicable  and  eternal  treasure.  It  nourished 
Him  and  was  for  all  men. 

"  I  have  meat  to  eat,"  said  He.  "  Who  brought 
it  to  Him  ?  "  asked  they.  "  A  primrose  by  the 
river's  brim  a  yellow  primrose"  was  to  them; 
and  it  was  nothing  more.  Meat  was  meat,  mut- 
ton or  beef  to  His  disciples.  But  to  Him  the 
primrose  was  a  volume  of  revelation.  Meat  was 
very  life  of  God  within  His  soul.  Language  to 
Christ  was  windows  into  the  wealth  of  the  eterni- 
ties and  the  infinites.  To  men  it  was  words. 
His  discernment  of  latent  values  in  men  made 
Him  a  rich  man  wherever  He  found  a  fellow. 
He  had  cargoes  of  redeemable  character  afloat  on 
the  wide  waters  of  mankind,  and  these  He  was 
forever  drawing  home.  Men  brought  Him  a  sin- 
ner, flotsam  of  Galilee ;  and  Jesus  saw  Himself 
rich  with  the  latent  life  of  Peter  of  Pentecost, 
victor  of  the  gates  of  hell.  The  stained  hand  of 
the  Samaritan  concubine  became  under  His  faith 
purified  to  bear  the  chalice  of  the  life  of  God. 
He  had  more  wealth  latent  in  human  character 


170  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

than  Croesus  ever  dreamed  of.  His  universalism, 
also,  made  Him  rich  with  all  the  wealth  of  hu- 
manity. All  around  Him  men  choked  and  died 
in  the  stifling  air  of  racial  exclusion  and  preju- 
dice. He  lived  in  the  whole  free  world.  Think- 
ing in  terms  of  all  mankind  and  all  the  ages 
makes  the  thinker  rich  beyond  all  the  dreams  of 
any  racial  avarice  or  national  pride. 

But  above  all  His  meat  was  simply  this :  to 
walk  with  God,  to  do  the  will  of  God  and  to  ac- 
complish His  work.  His  life  was  in  God's  will, 
His  strength  in  God's  companionship.  He  lived 
powerfully  among  men  because  He  dwelt  deeply 
in  God.  His  wealth  was  not  herds  and  gold,  nor 
bonds  and  credits,  nor  deeds ;  but  the  power  to 
do  deeds  in  the  might  and  pity  of  God. 

And  the  inward  resources  of  Christ  which  are 
true  wealth  are  accessible  also  to  us  ;  and  not  ac- 
cessible only,  but  indispensable.  We  need  not 
set  much  store  by  what  the  world  calls  wealth. 
Its  one  worthy  use  is  as  capital  for  human  service  ; 
and  Christ  who  had  none  of  it  here  still  did  and 
inspired  more  service  than  all  the  world's  capital 
has  performed.  Louis  Pasteur  was  living  on  a 
salary  of  a  few  hundred  francs.  All  that  he  did 
was  to  examine  with  a  microscope  things  infin- 
itesimally  small  and  to  reflect  upon  them,  and 
then  in  his  laboratory  to  write  down  and  send 
forth  some  new  ideas.  The  practical  men  derided 
his  "  pure  science," — a  mere  student  of  theories, 


THE  LIFE  INVISIBLE  lYl 

spinner  of  silk  dreams  thinner  than  the  filaments 
of  the  silkworms  of  southern  France.  But  Pas- 
teur's thoughts  were  the  richest  source  of  wealth 
in  France.  "  Pasteur's  discoveries  alone,"  said 
Huxley,  '*  would  suffice  to  cover  the  war  indem- 
nity paid  by  France  to  Germany  in  1870."  ^ 
True  wealth  is  inward  resources,  the  love  of 
God's  world,  of  truth  and  holy  thoughts,  friend- 
ship with  the  living  and  the  dead,  the  possession 
of  the  Son  of  God  and  His  words  which  are  spirit 
and  life,  and  of  His  Spirit  "  whom  the  world  can- 
not receive ;  for  it  beholdeth  Him  not,  neither 
knoweth  Him ;  ye  know  Him ;  for  He  abideth 
with  you,  and  shall  be  in  you." 

And  all  this  wealth  may  be  ours  without  going 
anywhere  for  it.  No  man  brought  it  to  Him. 
"  I  have  meat,"  He  said.  So  He  calls  us  to  be 
rich.  We  do  not  need  to  go  anywhere  for  it. 
No  man  needs  to  bring  it  to  us.  It  is  here.  It 
is  Himself — the  Bread  of  Life.  Can  we  also  say, 
*•  I  have  it — meat  to  eat,  of  the  world  unknown, 
within  my  soul,  within  my  soul "  ? 

To  be  able  to  say  that  is  our  great  American 
need.  I  will  not  say  that  it  is  a  greater  need 
now  than  it  has  ever  been  because  we  have 
deteriorated  and  need  to  recover  the  element  of 
spiritual  idealism  in  our  national  character.  We 
have  not  deteriorated.  Doubtless  we  have  lost 
many  things  that  it  would  have  been  well  for  us 

1  Vallery-Radot,  "  Life  of  Pasteur,"  popular  edition,  p.  374. 


172  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

to  have  kept,  and  have  kept  much  that  it  would 
have  been  better  to  lose.  But  we  have  gained 
in  our  perception  of  the  higher  values  and  we 
seek  them  more  and  not  less  than  ever  before. 
We  are  far  from  being  what  we  ought  to  be,  but 
the  past  was  farther,  and  we  only  think  otherwise 
because  we  clothe  the  past  in  mists  of  idealiza- 
tion. That  very  error  is  proof  of  our  deeper 
spiritual  discerning.  Evils  are  challenged  now 
which  passed  uncondemned  a  half  generation 
ago.  But  though  we  have  gained,  we  need  to 
gain  more,  and  what  we  need  to  gain  is  not 
something  aesthetic  or  intellectual  only,  not 
broader  philosophies  or  wider  social  programs, 
not  anything  external  or  merely  ethical,  but 
something  biological  and  dynamic.  We  need 
the  push  and  power  of  what  One  and  One  only 
offers.  "The  thief  cometh  not,"  said  Christ, 
"  but  that  he  may  steal,  and  kill,  and  destroy : 
I  came  that  they  may  have  life,  and  may  have  it 
abundantly." 

Not  long  before  his  death,  as  all  remember, 
the  late  Mr.  Morgan  was  summoned  to  testify 
before  a  congressional  committee  which  was 
seeking  to  locate  the  seat  of  the  money  power. 
The  object  of  those  examining  Mr.  Morgan  was 
to  bring  out  the  extent  of  his  own  influence  and 
control,  and  to  show,  if  possible,  that  in  the 
hands  of  a  few  men  was  concentrated  the  real 
domination  of  the  financial  life  of  America.     The 


THE  LIFE  INVISIBLE  173 

popular  impression,  after  the  examination  was 
over,  was  that  Mr.  Morgan's  modest  disavowals 
were  justified  by  all  the  testimony,  and  that  there 
was  no  one  person,  or  any  group  of  individuals, 
in  this  country  who  possessed  so  much  power  as 
was  supposed  to  reside  in  the  hands  of  a  little 
company  of  men. 

Now,  at  the  best,  there  was  no  question  of 
creating  or  producing  anything.  Nobody 
thought  of  asking  Mr.  Morgan  whether  he  could 
create  a  grain  of  wheat,  or  heal  a  disease,  or 
bring  into  existence  anything  that  was  not  al- 
ready here.  The  main  question  was  how  much 
of  something  that  was  here  already  was  he,  or 
any  other  man,  able  to  control.  As  one  read 
the  testimony,  the  one  dominant  impression  it 
made  on  his  mind  was  how  small  and  weak  and 
ineffectual  even  the  strongest  human  life  was, 
and  how  little  was  the  effect  that  it  could  pro- 
duce in  what  it  was  able  to  do  in  behalf  of 
others. 

How  weak  does  even  the  strongest  personality 
appear  when  contrasted  with  One  Who  can  say 
such  words  as  these  1  have  just  quoted  !  Sup- 
pose some  great  man  now  living  were  to  say  to 
us  :  •*  Come  unto  me,  all  ye  that  labour  and  are 
heavy  laden,  and  I  will  give  you  rest.  If  any 
man  thirst,  let  him  come  unto  me,  and  drink.  I 
am  come  that  they  may  have  life,  and  may  have 
it  abundantly,"  how  startled  we  should  be  !     But 


174  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

we  have  become  familiar  with  the  claim  on  the 
lips  of  Christ  and  do  not  realize  what  we  are 
really  confronted  with  in  that  single  great  Per- 
sonality standing  among  men  and  offering  to 
meet  the  ultimate  human  need,  to  give  us  the 
deepest,  richest,  most  priceless  thing  in  the 
world,  which  no  one  of  us  can  give  another. 
"  I  am  come  that  ye  may  have  life,  and  that  ye 
may  have  it  abundantly." 

And  notice  that  here  is  not  a  claim  only. 
There  is  a  strange  and  startling  contrast.  "  The 
thief  cometh  to  steal,  and  to  kill,  and  to  destroy : 
I  am  come  that  ye  may  have  life."  On  the  one 
side  is  our  Lord.  Him  we  know.  But  who  is 
this  thief  on  the  other  side  who  has  come,  not  to 
give  life,  but  to  reduce  it,  contract  it,  dilute  it — 
destroy  it  altogether?  Well,  we  know  well 
enough  that  sin  is  such  a  thief,  that  wherever 
sin  is  allowed  to  come  into  our  lives  it  abridges 
those  lives,  draws  in  the  walls  of  their  expansion, 
cuts  down  and  impoverishes  their  joys.  And 
there  are  many  things  short  of  sin,  less  coarse 
and  evil,  which,  nevertheless,  draw  in  the  bound- 
aries of  life,  narrow  and  stifle  it,  and  do  the  work 
of  the  thief  who  came  to  kill,  and  to  destroy,  and 
to  steal.  Over  against  all  these  He  stands  Who 
said  :  "I  came  to  give  life,  to  give  it  abun- 
dandy." 

Now  we  know  very  well  what  men  and  women 
say   when  you  bring  them  this  offer  of  Christ's 


THE  LIFE  INVISIBLE  175 

about  His  life.  "  Oh,"  they  say,  "  it  all  depends 
upon  what  you  mean  by  life.  I  have  my  own 
idea  of  life.  The  life  I  am  living  is  rich  and 
satisfying  to  me,  and  I  am  not  drawn  to  this  life 
that  your  tepid  religion  offers  me  in  exchange." 
But  are  those  who  answer  so  fully  satisfied  ?  Are 
they  really  satisfied  at  all  with  any  part  of  their 
life  except  such  of  it  as  consists  of  the  kind  of 
life  that  Jesus  Christ  our  Lord  Himself  came  to 
bring,  with  which  alone  the  hearts  of  men  can  be 
content  ? 

What  do  we  mean  when  we  speak  of  life  that 
really  satisfies  us  ?  I  asked  some  boys  a  little 
while  ago  what  they  meant  when  they  spoke 
about  life,  real  life  that  would  satisfy  men.  Four 
were  boys  at  the  Hill  School,  Pottstown,  Pa. 
They  sat  down  and  collaborated  for  a  while  as 
to  what  real  life  meant  to  them,  and  when  they 
got  through  it  came  to  this :  Purity,  integrity, 
the  principle  of  Christian  service,  unselfishness, 
and  the  desire  to  be  perfect.  I  asked  another 
man  at  Princeton  what  life  meant  to  him,  real 
life.  He  was  one  of  the  best  athletes  in  the  col- 
lege, and  this  was  the  answer  he  gave  :  Humility, 
charitableness,  bravery,  strength  of  conviction, 
honesty,  sincerity,  truthfulness  and  the  power  to 
forgive.  I  asked  a  man  at  Yale  what  he  thought 
life  was.  He  was  the  most  popular  man  in  the 
senior  class  at  that  time.  This  was  what  he 
wrote  down  :  "  Service  after  the  manner  of  Jesus, 


176  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

honesty  carried  all  the  way  through,  sympathy, 
capacity  for  work,  patience  in  holding  to  prin- 
ciple, as  well  as  fidelity  in  actual  duty." 

Now  if  we  were  to  define  life  better  than  these 
boys,  and  yet  in  the  way  they  were  feeling  after, 
not  in  any  concrete  expressions,  but  in  its  central 
principle,  we  should  borrow  the  words  which 
Professor  Drummond  borrowed  from  Herbert 
Spencer.  Spencer  said  that  the  perfect  corre- 
spondence of  any  organism  with  its  environment 
would  be  perfect  life.  Professor  Drummond 
modified  this  by  adding  just  one  word  :  the  per- 
fect correspondence  of  any  organism  with  a  per- 
fect environment  would  be  perfect  life.  Or,  to 
put  it  as  it  is  stated  in  one  of  our  best  diction- 
aries :  life  is  that  state  in  any  animal  or  plant  in 
which  its  different  functions  are  all  occupied  in 
active  healthy  expression.  Now  that  is  just 
what  those  boys  were  feeling  after.  Life  is  the 
free  and  fearless  completion  of  ourselves.  Life 
is  our  utter  unfolding  in  the  direction  of  that  of 
which  we  are  capable.  Life  is  the  pushing  out 
of  the  rim  of  our  world  into  the  great  and  bound- 
less riches  of  God.  Life  is  the  opening  up  of 
the  gates  of  our  prison  house  that  we  may  go 
after  Him  Whose  word  to  men  was :  "  If  ye 
abide  in  my  word,  then  are  ye  truly  my  dis- 
ciples; and  ye  shall  know  the  truth,  and  the 
truth  shall  make  you  free."  Life  is  what  Jesus 
Christ  came  to  give,  for  His  mission  was  this : 


THE  LIFE  INVISIBLE  1Y7 

"  The  thief  came  to  steal,  and  to  kill,  and  to  des- 
troy. I  am  come  that  they  may  have  life,  and 
may  have  it  abundantly." 

One  great  purpose  of  the  Incarnation  was  to 
show  what  we  are  in  our  deepest  being  in  the 
purpose  of  God,  and  what  we  are  capable  of.  Our 
Lord  did  not  come  to  parade  before  men  the  ex- 
ceptional life  to  which  they  could  never  attain. 
He  came,  as  He  Himself  said,  to  show  them 
what  it  had  been  His  Father's  will  that  they 
should  all  be.  "As  my  Father  hath  sent  me, 
even  so  send  I  you."  "  I  go  unto  my  Father, 
and  your  Father ;  and  to  my  God,  and  your 
God."  What  Jesus  Christ  was  in  the  fullness  of 
His  unlimited  life  was  the  revealing  of  what  God 
has  in  His  will  for  every  one  of  us.  The  ampli- 
tudes that  we  see  in  Him,  the  subsidence  of  all 
the  petty  boundaries,  the  unhampered  outgoing 
of  His  free  spirit  in  the  area  of  His  Father,  God, 
— all  that  is  just  a  picture  of  what  God  meant  the 
life  of  each  one  of  us  to  be.  That  is  why  they 
called  Him  the  Son  of  Man,  because  He  was  the 
picture  of  what  God  had  meant  that  His  son, 
man,  might  be. 

And  Christ  came,  not  only  to  show  the  possi- 
bilities of  such  being,  of  what  men  could  do  and 
what  they  could  be  made,  but  to  be  Himself  that 
expression  of  power  in  them  competent  to  eflect 
such  a  result,  the  tide  of  the  boundless  life  flow- 
ing through  all  the  channels  that  they  could  ofler 


178  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

to  Him.  He  came  to  be  in  mankind  the  deep, 
flowing  stream  of  a  new  life.  One  regrets  to 
find  in  some  churches  to-day  in  the  repetition  of 
the  Apostles'  Creed  the  omission  of  the  sentence: 
"  He  descended  into  hell."  There  is  no  word  in 
the  Creed  which  expresses  more  fully  the  utter- 
most reach  of  the  purpose  of  our  Lord  and  the 
scope  and  boundlessness  of  His  love.  Down 
even  into  hell  He  went  in  the  utterance  of  His 
love  for  mankind.  How  much  this  means  !  But 
to  say  no  more,  it  means  this,  that  deep  into  the 
dark  of  our  human  life  He  came,  that  there,  be- 
low all  sight,  below  all  thought.  He  might  release 
the  vital  streams  that  have  been  flowing  from  the 
fountain  of  Calvary  ever  since,  and  which  have 
no  other  fountain. 

We  know  what  would  happen  in  our  bodies, 
to  put  it  simply,  if  some  great  artery  that  fed  our 
life  were  tied.  Atrophy  and  palsy  would  creep 
at  once  over  our  unnourished  frames.  Precisely 
the  same  thing  is  true  in  the  deeper  life  of  our 
souls,  if  the  arteries,  those  channels  through 
which  Christ  would  pour  His  energy  and 
strength  and  power,  are  tied.  To  put  the  same 
thing  still  more  simply  :  Suppose  the  Mississippi 
River  instead  of  running  into  the  Gulf  ran  out 
of  the  Gulf  deep  into  the  land.  Suppose  all  of 
the  rivers  poured  into  the  land  instead  of  into 
the  seas.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  that  is  in  one 
sense  what  they  do.     We  have  got  long  past 


THE  LIFE  INVISIBLE  179 

looking  at  rivers  as  drains  for  the  land.  We 
know  that  they  are  arteries  through  which  the 
life-blood  of  the  seas  flows  upon  the  land  by 
way  of  the  skies.  And  suppose  there  were  no 
Mississippi  River.  Suppose  it  were  stopped  at 
the  gate.  What  a  chill  and  death  would  fall 
upon  the  land  !  And  how  often  that  life  of  Christ 
which  comes  up  to  the  gates  of  men's  lives  is 
stifled,  the  stream  that  would  pour  in  kept  out, 
the  power  that  would  control  and  remake  blocked 
at  the  door  through  which  it  would  enter.  "  The 
thief  is  come,"  He  says,  "  and  you  let  him  in,  to 
kill,  and  to  steal,  and  to  destroy  ;  I  am  come, 
and  you  keep  Me  out.  And  I  am  come  that 
you  may  have  life,  and  that  you  may  have  it  in 
all  the  abundance  of  God." 

And  we  know  that  this  life  of  Christ  is  real  and 
abundant  life  because  it  fulfills  the  tests  of  life. 
It  is  a  life  of  fullness  in  all  its  correspondences 
and  relationships.  It  completes  life  to  the  utter- 
most of  its  possibilities,  setting  it  in  all  those  ties 
with  that  which  is  outside  of  it,  which  constitute 
life.  For,  after  all,  there  is  no  separable  life. 
All  the  life  that  we  know  is  relationship.  Our 
Lord  defined  it  in  such  terms  in  His  great 
prayer :  "  This  is  life  eternal,  that  they  might 
know  thee  the  only  true  God,  and  Jesus  Christ, 
whom  thou  hast  sent."  Life  can  only  be  con- 
strued in  terms  of  correspondence. 

We  know  that  the  life  Christ  came  to  give, 


180  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

and  does  give,  is  the  satisfying  and  real  life, 
because  it  meets  these  testings.  It  gives  us  this 
wealth  of  correspondence  of  relationship. 

"  Oh,  the  pure  delight  of  a  single  hour. 
That  before  Thy  Cross  I  spend, 
When  I  kneel  in  prayer,  and  with  Thee,  ray  God, 
I  commune  as  friend  with  friend." 

We  know  that  the  life  Christ  brings  is  complete 
and  full,  because  it  reestablishes  the  tie  and  union 
between  ourselves  and  God,  and  He  becomes  to 
us  again  our  Father  and  our  Friend.  We  know 
it,  because  it  is  the  root  of  all  deep  and  true  and 
satisfying  human  relationships.  How  can  there 
be  a  real  and  full  union  of  one  man  and  one 
woman  that  is  not  a  union  in  Christ  ?  And  for 
the  highest  friendship  and  its  ideals  we  find 
sanction  and  nourishment  best  in  Him  and  the 
groundwork  of  His  life. 

And  Christ's  is  the  real  and  satisfying  life,  be- 
cause it  is  creative  and  energizing.  It  is  not 
like  the  influence  of  that  thief — selfishness,  low 
desire,  sin  and  small  ambition — who  kills  and 
steals  and  destroys.  But  the  life  that  Christ  is 
teems  with  vitalizing  power ;  it  is  strength  and 
energy  and  new  service  in  men.  I  have  never 
seen  it  more  beautifully  put  than  in  a  letter  of 
Stanley  to  David  Livingstone.  It  was  found  by 
Lady  Stanley  in  a  little  pocketbook  which  her 
husband  had  carried  on  the  expedition  for  the 
relief   of   Livingstone.     It   was   written  in  lead 


THE  LIFE  INVISIBLE  181 

pencil.  It  was  a  copy  of  the  letter  that  Stanley 
had  written  to  the  great  explorer  the  very  day 
after  he  left  him.  It  has  sometimes  been  ques- 
tioned whether  Livingstone  really  made  on  Stan- 
ley the  impression  which  Stanley  describes  in  his 
autobiography.  There  have  been  those  who  said 
that  that  picture  was  but  the  reading  back  over 
the  intervening  years  of  a  growing  hero  worship. 
But  here  is  the  letter  which  Stanley  wrote  as  he 
came  fresh  from  the  old  missionary's  companion- 
ship and  the  inspiration  of  his  personality  : 

"  My  dear  Doctor  : 

"I  have  parted  from  you  all  too  soon;  I  feel  it 
deeply ;  I  am  entirely  conscious  of  it  from  being  so  de- 
pressed. ...  In  writing  to  you,  I  am  not  writing  to 
an  idea  now,  but  to  an  embodiment  of  warm,  good  fellow- 
ship, of  everything  that  is  noble  and  right,  of  sound  com- 
mon sense,  of  everything  practical  and  right-minded. 

"  I  have  talked  with  you;  your  presence  is  almost  pal- 
pable, though  you  are  absent.     .     .     . 

"  It  seems  as  if  I  had  left  a  community  of  friends  and 
relations.  The  utter  loneliness  of  myself,  the  void  that  has 
been  created,  the  pang  at  parting,  the  bleak  aspect  of  the 
future,  is  the  same  as  1  have  felt  before,  when  parting  from 
dear  friends. 

"  Why  should  people  be  subjected  to  these  partings, 
with  the  several  sorrows  and  pangs  that  surely  follow 
them  ? — It  is  a  consolation,  however,  after  tearing  myself 
away,  that  I  am  about  to  do  you  a  service,  for  then  I  have 
not  quite  parted  from  you  ;  you  and  I  are  not  quite  sep- 
arate.    Though  I  am  not  present  to  you  bodily,  you  must 


182  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

think  of  me  daily  until  your  caravan  arrives.  Though  you 
are  not  before  me  visibly,  I  shall  think  of  you  constantly, 
until  your  least  wish  has  been  attended  to.  In  this  way 
the  chain  of  remembrance  will  not  be  severed. 

**  'Not  yet,'  I  say  to  myself,  '  are  we  apart,'  and  this  to 
me,  dear  Doctor,  is  consoling,  believe  me.  Had  I  a  series 
of  services  to  perform  for  you,  why  then  !  we  should  never 
have  to  part. 

"  Do  not  fear  then,  I  beg,  to  ask,  nay,  to  command, 
whatever  lies  in  my  power.  And  do  not,  I  beg  of  you, 
attribute  these  professions  to  interested  motives,  but  accept 
them,  or  believe  them,  in  the  spirit  in  which  they  are 
made,  in  that  true  David  Livingstone  spirit  I  have  happily 
become  acquainted  with." 

And  out  from  that  lonely  spot  in  eastern 
Africa,  the  younger  man  came  to  begin  a  new 
career ;  all  the  old  aimlessness  and  shiftlessness 
and  drifting  gone  forever  from  his  life,  to  pass 
on  now  to  lift  up  the  mission  which,  beneath  the 
dripping  eaves  of  the  hut  in  which  he  died,  David 
Livingstone  laid  down.  The  tide  of  a  new  life 
and  a  new  service  was  in  him.  "  I  came  that  ye 
may  have  life,  and  that  ye  may  have  it  abun- 
dantly." He  had  seen  Christ  and  felt  the  con- 
tagion of  the  life  of  Christ  in  Livingstone,  and 
Christ's  word,  articulate  or  inarticulate,  had  come 
to  live  in  him.  And  that  life  is  life  in  the  power 
and  desire  to  serve. 

This  life  that  Christ  came  to  give  is  the  only 
real  and  satisfying  life,  because  it  alone  endures. 
We  gather  at  Northfield  each  summer  and  always 


THE  LIFE  INVISIBLE  188 

go  up  to  read  afresh  the  brief  inscription  on  Mr. 

Moody's  grave  on  Round  Top,  "  The  world  pass- 

eth  away,  and  the  lust  thereof ;  but  he  that  doeth 

the  will  of  God  abideth  forever."     We  sing  the 

same  great  truth  constantly  in  George  Matheson's 

hymn  : 

"Hay  in  dust  life's  glory  dead, 
And  from  the  ground  there  blossoms  red 
Life  that  shall  endless  be." 

I  wrote  the  other  day  to  a  friend  about  her 
sister-in-law's  death,  and  this  was  the  last  sen- 
tence of  the  letter  which  she  wrote  in  reply : 

'« I  do  not  know  if  he"— that  was  her  brother—"  told 

you  how  beautiful  it  was  at  the  last ;  how  S 's  face 

lighted  up  with  such  an  expression  of  surprise  and  adora- 
tion, with  her  eyes  open  to  their  fullest  extent,  and  then  it 
was  all  over.  Only  a  glimpse  into  the  life  that  was  not  to 
end  could  have  brought  such  a  look  to  a  human  face." 

"  And  that  life,"  said  He  Who  was  the  life,  "  I 
brought  with  Me  and  will  give  to  you." 

Let  us  lift  our  hearts  to  the  life  that  shall  end- 
less be,  to  the  liberty  on  which  there  never  lay  a 
chain,  to  the  light  of  the  land  that  hath  no  need 
of  any  sun,  because  the  "  Lamb  is  the  light 
thereof,"  the  land  of  the  new  morning  and  the 
tearless  life.  The  thief  cometh— let  him  not 
come  in  I — only  to  kill,  and  to  steal,  and  to  des- 
troy. "  I  am  come,  and  I  stand  at  the  door 
and  ask  you  now  to  let  Me  in,  that  you  may 
have  life  abundantly." 


184  THE  STUFF  OF  MANHOOD 

As  these  lectures  close  I  would  press  all  this 
in  the  most  earnest  and  personal  terms  upon 
each  one  individually.  The  processes  of  social 
and  moral  progress  in  humanity  are  retarded  or 
broken  down  because  they  are  not  carried  on  a 
volume  of  adequate  spiritual  life  in  men.  There 
ought  to  be  a  Kingdom  of  Living  Love  and 
Brotherly  Will  on  the  earth.  And  some  day 
there  will  be,  but  there  is  not  now  and  there  can- 
not be  until  the  anemia  of  man  is  healed,  and  it 
can  be  healed  in  only  one  way — by  more  life  in 
man,  by  life  abounding  in  men.  The  commer- 
cial and  materialistic  solution  of  the  world's 
problem  has  been  fully  tried.  For  a  generation 
it  has  been  preached  and  practiced  as  the  one 
saving  gospel  and  out  of  the  depths  to  which  it 
brought  us  we  begin  to  turn  heavenward  again. 
The  day  for  a  new  creed  has  dawned — the  old 
creed  of  truth  and  hope  and  freedom  and  life,  of 
the  wealth  and  glory  of  a  city  unseen  as  yet,  hid 
in  the  heavens  and  only  possible  on  the  earth  as 
drawn  down  by  men  to  whom  the  invisible  things 
are  the  surest  of  all  realities  and  who  live  and  are 
strong  in  God. 


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CORTLANDT    MYERS,     D.  D.  Author  .f  "Real  Pray,r» 

•^— ■ ' "ThtRtal  Holy  Spirit,"  ttt. 

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prepared  in  bright,  interesting  fashion,  and  abundantly  fur- 
nished with  suitable  and  forceful  illustration. 

JOHN  T.  FARIS  Popular-Price  Editions 

The  "Success  Books'* 

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6oc.net  (postage  extra). 
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young  men  in  the  home  in  school  among  associates  aad  ra 
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BIOGRAPHY 

CHARLES  G.   TRUMBULL 

Anthony  Comstock,  Fighter 

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An  authorized  biography  of  this  great  fighter  for  purity. 
The  story  is  one  of  life-and-death  adventure,  moral  and 
physical  heroism,  and  incomparable  achievement.  During 
the  thirty  years  in  which  Mr.  Comstock  has  been  working  for 
the  suppression  of  vice  he  has  destroyed  over  43  tons  of  vile 
books,  28,425  pounds  of  stereotype  plates,  two  and  a  half 
million  obscene  pictures  and  12,945  negatives.  The  detailed 
account  of  how  all  this  was  done  is  a  most  thrilling  and  re- 
markable   story. 

FRANK  J.  CANNON— DR.  GEORGE  L    KNAPP 

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teresting characters  in  American  history. 

FRANCES   WILLARD 

Frances  Willard  :     Her  Life  and  Her  Work 

By  Ray  Strachey.  With  an  Introduction  by  Lady 
Henry  Somerset.    Illustrated,  8vo,  cloth,  net  $1.50. 

A  notable  new  life  of  the  great  temperance  advocate  writ- 
ten by  an  English  woman  from  an  entirely  new  standpoint. 
Mrs.  Strachey,  the  granddaughter  of  the  author  of  "A 
Christian's  Secret  of  a  Happy  Life,"  had  immediate  access 
to  Miss  Willard's  letters,  journals  and  papers,  and  the  bene- 
fit of  her  grandmother's  advice  and  knowledge. 

Israel  Zangwill  says  of  the  book,  "A  masterpiece  of  con- 
densation, an  adequate  biography  of  perhaps  the  greatest 
woman  America  has  produced.  Nobody  can  read  this  book 
without  becoming  braver,   better,  wiser." 

MRS.  S.  MOORE  SITES 

Nathan  Sites: 

Introduction  by  Bishop  W.  F.  McDowell.  Oriental 
Hand-Painted  Illustrations,  gilt  top,  net  $1.50. 

This  is  one  of  the  notable  books  of  the  year.  China  looms 
large  in  current  political  and  religious  interest,  so  that  this 
life  story  of  one  who  for  nearly  half  a  century  has  been 
closely  identified  with  social  and  religious  reform  in  that 
country  roust  have  a  large  place  in  current  literature. 


QUESTIONS  OF  THE  FAITH 

JAMES  H.  SNOIVDEN,  P.P. 

The  Psychology  of  Religion 

•    8vo,  cloth,  net  $1.50, 

Psychology  is  one  of  the  most  rapidly  advancing  of  modern 
sciences,  and  Dr.  Snowden's  book  will  find  a  ready  welcome. 
While  especially  adapted  for  the  use  of  ministers  and  teach- 
ers, it  is  not  in  any  sense  an  ultra-academic  work.  This  is 
evidenced  by  the  fact  that  the  material  forming  it  has  been 
delivered  not  only  as  a  successful  Summer  School  course,  but 
in  the  form  of  popular  lectures,  open  to  the  general  public. 

IVILLIAM  HALLOCK  JOHNSON,  PL  P.,  P.P. 

ProftsitT  •/  Griek  and  Nrw  Ttstammt  Litiraturi  in  Lincoln  Univirstty,  ta. 

The  Christian  Faith  under  Modern 
Searchlight 

The  L.  P.  Stone  Lectures,  Princeton.  Intro- 
duction by  Francis  L.  Patton,  D.D.    Cloth,  net  $1.25. 

The  faith  which  is  to  survive  must  not  only  be  a  traditional 
but  an  intelligent  faith  which  has  its  roots  in  reason  and  ex- 
perience and  its  blossom  and  fruit  in  character  and  good 
works.  To  this  end,  the  author  examines  the  fundamentals 
of  the  Christian  belief  in  the  light  of  to-day  and  reaches  the 
conclusion  that  every  advance  in  knowledge  establishes  its 
•overeign  claim  to  be  from  heaven  and  not  from  men. 

ANPREW  W.  ARCHIBALP,   P.P. 

Author  of  "Tht  Bible  Verified,"  "The  Trend  of  the  Centuries,"  etc. 

The  Modem  Man  Facing  the  Old 
Problems 

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form  or  another,  seem  recurrent  in  every  age,  are  examined 
from  what  may  be  called  a  Biblical  viewpoint.  That  is  to  sajr, 
the  author  by  its  illuminating  rays,  endeavors  to  find  eluci- 
dation and  solution  for  the  difficulties,  which  in  more  or  less 
degree,  perplex  believer  and  unbeliever  alike. 

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represent  his  best  efforts,  and  contains  an  experienced  edi- 
tor's suggestions  for  the  ever-recurrent  problems _  confronting 
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Best  wields  a  facile  pen,  and  a  sudden  gleam  of  beauty,_  a 
difficult  thought  set  in  a  perfect  phrase,  or  an  old  idea  in- 
vested with  new  meaning  and  grace,  meets  one  at  every  turn 
of  the  page." — The  Record  Herald, 


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JOHN     W.      LIGON  Pastor  Christian   Church. 

""""^~^^~^~^"^~~~^~^  Barhoursvilli,  Ify. 

Paul  the  Apostle 

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to  the  use  of  busy  men  and  women  and  the  young  people  of 
the  Church.  The  events  and  incidents^  of  Paul's  career  are 
woven  into  a  continuous  narrative,  furnishing  a  living  picture 
of  his  wonderful  life  as  far  as  that  life  can  be  known. 

DIVIGHT    GODDARD 

Jesus 

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classes,  and  as  a  gift  book  to  those  we  would  like  to  become 
interested  in  our  Lord. 

B.  H.  CARROLL,  P.P. 

An  Interpretation  of  the  English  Bible 

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The  Acts.    Svo,  cloth,  net  $2.25. 

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mentary on  the  English  Bible  ever  published,  is  our  sincere 
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EDIVARD  AUGUSTUS  GEORGE 

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PROF.   IV.   G.    MOOREHEAD 
OUTLINE  STUDIES  in  the  NEW  TESTAMENT  SERIES 

The  Catholic  Epistles  and  Revelation 

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WILLIAM  SMITH,  LLP, 

A  Dictionary  of  the  Bible 

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Lord.  He  has  done  his  work  well,  and  the  result  is  a  com- 
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CHRIST'S  LIFE  AND  MESSAGE 

ALBERT  L.   VAIL 

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order  that  His  appeal  to  various  classes  of  mankind  might 
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DAVID  DE  FOREST  BURRELL      Auth,r ./  « Th,  Gift" 

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An  Idyll  of  the  Desert.    i6mo,  net  35c. 

An  appealing  story  of  a  Shepherd's  search  for  the  Star. 
It  is  so  tender,  so  sweet,  so  Christ-like,  it  is  sure  to  captivata 
everyone. 


p„„ceton  Theological  S'i'^^'^'.f,?"'  ufill7ll 


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